NEW DELHI :
Adoption of technology and data analytics since the onset of the pandemic have made companies more productive, competitive and decisive, as per panellists at tech giant Microsoft’s annual flagship event ‘Future Ready’.
Data analytics has now become a tool, enabling companies with speedier decision-taking as most of this would be automated, they added.
“Data is only going to be critical, in our view. Now how you use, analyse and act upon it, is going to distinguish between great companies to good companies and average companies,” Pidilite Industries Managing Director Bharat Puri said.
Some sectors such as retail were quick in tech adoption, he noted.
According to Puri, there were two major developments in the last two years — compulsion from the demand side to accelerate adoption and companies, particularly startups, started getting viable business propositions by using technology.
“In the last 18 months, everything has changed. Earlier it was nice to do and today, you cannot do without it,” Puri said while participating in a session titled ‘An innovation DNA to succeed in a modern world’.
The way companies sell and distribute their products, work and influence markets, all have changed dramatically with the help of data and technology, he pointed out.
“We are a company which does waterproofing and has a large number of masons and carpenters and use to interact with them on monthly basis. In the last four quarters, we had done 6,000 meets virtually with them on platforms like (Microsoft’s) Teams,” he added.
Expressing similar views, Larsen & Toubro Senior Vice President and Head of Corporate Centre Hasit Joshipura said data centres and analytics are helping companies explore new areas.
Companies such as Larsen & Toubro are looking for digital solutions to make the business more productive.
“L&T has three legs — service business, projects and products business, and each of them has used technology for the last two years to make sure operation continue seamlessly,” Joshipura said, adding L&T invested in digital solutions to enable remote working.
The company has set up an innovations fund to look for startups and technologies which can help digitalise L&T’s business such as construction, heavy engineering and hydrocarbons.
More new business opportunities have come up in the B2B marketplace, he noted.
“As we go forward, most companies would see a transformation in their portfolio from conventional business to more digitalised business,” he said.
HealthCare Global Enterprises Executive Chairman B S Ajai Kumar said the use of data in the medical world is the future and could be life-saving in many cases.
Moreover, technology can be used to collect the proper data needed for R&D projects, he added.
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