Harnessing AI to Drive True Digital Transformation with Genpact CDO Sanjay Srivastava

On the 15th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Sanjay Srivastava, Chief Digital Officer at Genpact. Genpact is a global professional services company with over 100,000 employees that enables the world's largest companies to digitally transform. Today, Sanjay shares how companies should approach driving true digital transformation and his perspective on the tremendous potential of AI.

Quick hits from Sanjay:

On how technology fits into the business: "I used to be all tech, tech, tech. And I realized tech is no longer the long pole in the tent. It's about people, processes, data, orchestration, and change management, all great things that need to happen for tech to deliver results."

On how to think about applications of AI: “Often [people] think about AI, it’s these big massive  things like autonomous driving…the reality is you have to put all that aside. Think about ‘small’ AI, like utilities and tool kits. It's things like NLP: NLP is ahead of human capability today. Computer vision is actually almost at human capability. Voice to text is pretty close if not at human capability. Think about day-to-day business processes and efficiency.”

On how tomorrow’s workforce can harness AI’s potential: “I always like to say that the world doesn't really need another machine learning engineer…what the world really needs is a finance and accounting specialist that understands machine learning; a manufacturing engineer that also understands computer vision; a data scientist that actually gets pattern recognition. It’s this idea of the intersection of sciences that becomes very important.”

On the difference between digital transformation and digitization: "Digital transformation is a big word these days, and it often gets used in the same way that digitization gets used. The reality is those two words, though interchangeable at times, couldn't be further apart in meaning. When we talk about digitization, it's about taking an end-to-end process, breaking it down into its components, and automating every single piece. You've got an end-to-end process that is faster, scalable, more efficient, and more reliable. But the work remains the same; it's just done faster. When you do digital transformation, you're redesigning the value chain, rethinking the experience, and delivering a much more sticky endpoint to a client. You are using new emerging technologies and get a redesigned end-to-end value proposition. The work that’s left behind is now different and new. Digital transformation is about orchestrating change in the dimensions of people, processes, data, and technology."

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Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Josh Meer and Luke Reiser