Firms with digital tech going to be more resilient against Covid: Nadella

The Microsoft CEO said the coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally accelerated, what was going to be a decade long process of digital transformation disseminated across industries

The coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally accelerated, what was going to be a decade long process of digital transformation disseminated across industries, said Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella.

“What we were going to think about doing in 2030 is probably going to be true in 2025. We've seen tremendous structural change,” said Nadella during a fireside chat with Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy at the Resurgence TiEcon Delhi - NCR event.
 

For instance, Nadella mentioned retail industry is going through seismic shifts. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of e-commerce. There are also changes in offline retail where one sees an increase in curbside pick up to offer customers a safe option when collecting their orders. Also, in healthcare, every outpatient visit is going to start with telemedicine. There is also the adoption of digital twins, which is the collection of digital data representing a physical object, in the manufacturing industry.
 

“We'll get past the pandemic, none of us can predict what the next tail event is,” said Nadella. “But digital technology is becoming core to both how we think about resilience in business continuity, as well as bringing about that next level of productivity change and efficiencies across industries.”
 

Nadella gave the example of e-commerce companies Myntra and Flipkart which are bridging digital transformation in the fashion and supply chain industry. Then there are startups with whom Microsoft is working. One such firm is iMocha which has built skilling API (application programming interface) that allows managers to be able to increase the pace of hiring and match the skills.

“No company can be 100 per cent immune to the (change issues) but the bottom line is any company that has digital technology in its core is going to be more resilient and faster to transform and adapt to any tail event,” said Nadella.
 

Krishnamurthy told Nadella that in India the pandemic and the lockdown in early 2020 drove significant changes in consumer behaviour. This has shifted the course of many businesses. This includes the way people interact with technology. For instance, many first time users got online to do the shopping and explore fintech offerings. “This is bridging a digital gap that may have taken years to close,” said Krishnamurthy.
 

Flipkart focused on accelerating innovation to meet the increasing needs of consumers through multilingual interfaces, digital payments and voice-enabled search. These were powered by a strong technology backbone and a robust supply chain and logistics network. 
 

Also, according to Krishnamurthy, technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) would be making great strides in the retail and fashion industry to provide an immersive feature-rich shopping experience to the customers.
 

While addressing consumer needs, Krishnamurthy said Flipkart also used technology to help businesses and MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) by providing critical data insights. It helped them pivot their businesses to stay relevant.

“Overall e-commerce helped keep consumption, manufacturing and distribution alive by preventing the economy from shutting down completely,” said Krishnamurthy.
 

Nadella said that it is an exciting time to see the level of ambition of the entrepreneurs and the startups and the transformation they're bringing about in the broad economy and society at scale. He said Microsoft’s mission is to be a platform and tool provider. These tools range from business applications to cloud and edge infrastructure. The company is seeing these technologies getting used to transform society.
 

“When I look at what you've done with Flipkart and Myntra and all of your work,” Nadella told Krishnamurthy. “You're truly democratizing commerce in the country and reshaping the economy and that's fantastic to see.”
 

Nadella also mentioned that Microsoft is working with Pixxel, a private satellite-imaging company. The Bengaluru-based firm is launching its first remote-sensing satellite on the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) workhorse rocket Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) this year. This first-of-a-kind private earth-observation mission will help provide solutions to many pressing environmental and agricultural issues, among other things. He said Pixxel is part of Microsoft’s Azure FarmBeats and Azure Space programme.
 

“They have a high ambition of launching microsatellites and really change how many sectors of the economy, including agriculture, will be transformed,” said Nadella.
 

Microsoft is also working with conversational AI platform CoRover. It has helped Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation’s (IRCTC) build AI-powered chatbot AskDisha. Powered by Microsoft Azure, AskDisha has helped improve the satisfaction of customer interactions by 70 per cent. Another company Paisabazaar.com has done transformative work around lending products Azure technologies.
 

“We're seeing broad usage of the platform by entrepreneurs with high ambitions across all sectors of the economy and that to me is the exciting thing in this next phase,” said Nadella. “The digital technology is becoming much more pervasive part of all industries.”