May the force be with you!

May the fourth! I wish I could begin my blog with: In a galaxy far, far away. Unfortunately, right here on earth, we are in the midst of a battle. Not unlike the Star Wars, it is a battle for humanity. I don't doubt its outcome; I don't doubt our ability to become resilient.

As we prepare a whole new way of living and working, technology has been one of our most critical allies. As large incumbent companies and digital start-ups prepare to handle the on-going challenges and the aftermath of a pandemic, one like we've never seen in our lifetimes, there is a very, very real need to become resilient. We must be geared to respond to everything that the market, customers, employees, and the environment demands. And, we must respond with urgency, efficiency, agility and securely. What makes it even more challenging is that we have a moving target, we don't know, for sure, how this pandemic will play out, how long it will last, what will it's far-reaching effects be. It is hard for enterprises to respond in such an environment, not only because it's uncertain, but also because they are mired in the pressures of the short term that is all-consuming that the disruption gets underplayed, even misjudged.

Being resilient, in the context of an enterprise, means being able to respond to the disruption, and other market signals, effectively without disrupting core business performance.

At Infosys, this means harnessing the benefits of resilience for ourselves and our clients. Just as Living beings can often recognize situations that need their response and then respond to these situations with precision, enterprises must also go further to evolve and build new capabilities that better position them to thrive. This is a combination of evolutionary, historical, and real-time information processing, relying on best practices while also recognizing exceptions. 

Any organization, however large and complex, can transform to be adaptive and resilient. They can gain start-up-like agility of response to disruption and dynamic market needs, simultaneously developing velocity of adaptation to match, by nurturing the following key enterprise capabilities:

Driving Intuitive Decisions: The ability to sense and respond by leveraging data-led insights. This serves to automate routine, frequently-made decisions and responses so little or no human intervention is needed to drive these tasks. 

We partnered with a global cosmetics firm that introduces 1500-2000 new products every year. We got real-time visibility into every stage of the product lifecycle and were able to reduce the product development time by more than 20%. We also drove improvements in every phase of the product lifecycle by implementing and automating domain aware ingestion agents, context-aware inferencing agents, and query agents. 

Building Responsive Value Chains: The flexibility to repurpose people's productivity into reimagining and reengineering the company's value chain - see what is not there, what needs to be made better, and what can be eliminated to deliver more value. This will drive continuous, agile cycles of rapid adaptation. 

We collaborated with a healthcare client, to improve claims reviewer productivity by 85%. We also continuously monitored and improved eight business-critical processes and their key metrics through the usage of business control center, process mining, and driving automation through cognitive bots.

Nurturing Creative Talent:A pool of problem-finders to find the right problems that must be solved for our future. After all, if a task – however complex – can be mechanically defined, we can build AI systems to execute it. But problem-finding remains a human frontier. 

At Infosys, we have been training all our employees on design thinking to become problem finders and solvers at scale. We saw this in action recently when a team of very passionate Infoscions worked with the government and their partners to develop and rollout a helpline and app to track and fight COVID-19.

Delivering Perceptive Experiences: Responding quickly, yet thoughtfully to opportunities to create valuable new experiences. This comes from learning to spot emerging and unmet needs. 

We have been working with a global sportswear and apparel brand, to analyze 7,000+ genes of every consumer to enable individual engagements with their 120+ million consumers across channels, while establishing new channels. This helped deliver a 35% repeat buy rate and NPS improvement by 67%.

On May the Fourth, can we draw inspiration from the much-loved trilogies? Sure, it's about the Jedi, the Dark side, blazing lightsabers, and battles in galaxies far, far away. But it's also about stepping up to a challenge, no matter what the odds. That's what we are doing today. We are stepping up, becoming resilient, and then applying that learning to life, work, our clients, as we continue to navigate our next.

May the force be with you!