To reach a billion, you need to reach everyone!

Recently, I was privileged to host a fantastic panel on India’s Digital Revolution, at the CII India Services Conclave 2021 with Shobana Kamineni and Kris Gopalakrishnan.  

As we spoke about the lasting changes and direction from the pandemic, a few ideas stuck with me… science, openness to response, wellbeing, and speed of enquiry.  

There is a new world order! And it’s driven by technology. Technology has changed how we look at the world and how we respond to it. It has allowed us to respond rapidly, find new solutions to old problems, and extend our reach to the proverbial last mile. Our Prime Minister has laid down the challenge… a vision where tech leads the transformation of India. And where every single person is empowered to share in the opportunities, success, and growth of the country. Tech can transform our villages, harness the power of our youth, enable investments, jobs, and innovation. I loved Kris’s aspiration for us to continue to build a knowledge economy, focusing on science and speed of response… that’s what fuels innovation!  

Trust is at the center of everything we do. I’ve touched upon this many times before. Trust is foundational to both adopting and building technology. First, trust that enterprises are aligned to customers’ and partners’ success. No customer wants to be dependent on a provider that sells them technology on one end and competes with them on the other. The other aspect is instilling trust in technology. At Microsoft, we think of trust as comprising six elements:  

• Security, an end-to-end cybersecurity approach to protect your businesses, customers, and ecosystem partners.  
• Privacy is a fundamental human right. Your data must remain your data.  
• Reliability does the solution, system or platform hold up every single time? 
• Ethics, we must ask tough, uncomfortable questions. 
• Compliance, meeting compliance standards in a dynamic regulatory environment is complex.  
• And finally, Transparency, advocating for new privacy laws to ensure transparency and control. 

To reach a billion, you need to reach everyone! Our journey to a five-trillion-dollar economy begins with more than a billion people. Our initiatives, whether for healthcare, manufacturing, or digital literacy must take on a much larger scale. But to enable a billion, every person should have Digital Access. It begins with building infrastructure of affordable devices and bandwidth, of digital services in different languages, that allows every community, urban and rural; every business, small and large; every worker, first-line and knowledge workers; and every person, including people with disabilities to benefit from technology. Shobana's comments resonated when she said that today, personalized, affordable health care for a billion is the focus of all her initiatives. We need to find ways to leverage tech innovation to drive not just business but societal outcomes, at the scale we need. Democratizing digital and making sure that everyone is enabled, to participate in the digital economy are more important now than ever before.  

The road ahead of us has many challenges… Among these, Trust and Access are immense opportunities to empower every person!