On Day 2 of Microsoft’s flagship event, ‘Future Ready,’ Swapna Bapat, Senior Director Data, Analytics and AI, Microsoft and Balaji Narayanamurthy, President, Head of Business Intelligence Unit, Axis Bank, exchanged ideas on what this means in an increasingly digital India. Here are some key takeaways and excerpts from the session “Creating a future-ready data culture”
- Digitization, new products built on data and optimizing of existing processes accentuate need for data.
- Data-driven culture will assist human capabilities, won’t replace them
Digitization, new products built on data and optimizing of existing processes accentuate need for data.
“Data is driving the organization’s response to a lot of challenges in the post pandemic world. Banking is also in the middle of this digital transformation… but what is now the differentiator [is] how you improve the customer experience… how you get that user experience right is through data. Yeah, digitization is happening, but customer experience and hyper personalization is a big focus area and data plays a front and central role there.” – Balaji Narayanamurthy
“Banking has been, you know, stale and old but in the last couple of years with the whole fintech challenge and response, we have new products like buy-now-pay-later, EMI at the point of sale, UPI — new products are coming up which are totally digital. [And] 80% of it is data driven… It’s no longer about who has the data but it’s about who is able to use the data well to provide a value or service to the customer.” — Balaji Narayanamurthy
“Today my team and I are empowered with data. We have a dashboard, we have access to the requisite amount of data that we need, and we are empowered to understand how all the matrix in our business are doing. In addition to that, machine learning and AI is predicting based on the current data, how we would be performing in the next few quarters to come. That is the predictable nature that our business has adopted, thanks to having access to rich and curated data.” — Swapna Bapat
Data-driven culture will assist human capabilities, won’t replace them:
“The data always speaks the truth. The decision-making power that a human gains by having access to the data allows that human to make a more intelligent decision. So, data is an assist, technology is an assist for decision making, it’s not a decision by itself.” — Swapna Bapat
“Data driven culture is not to be mixed with being blindly driven by anything. It is like any decision making — you own the decision but the way you own it up is by looking at data, assimilating it and then making your own call.” — Balaji Narayanamurthy
“I think it’s important to pay attention to data governance. [Use of data] has to be responsible, it has to be within boundaries, and it has to add value to the customer.” — Balaji Narayanamurthy
As India steps into a digital-first world, individuals, communities, organizations, and governments are partnering with the tech ecosystem. Microsoft is working closely with the government, industry, and civil society partners on several initiatives to empower Indians to achieve more.
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