AGENDA

In a Never Normal economic conditions, companies are facing unprecedented technology and business model disruptions. The labor market dynamics are dramatically shifting and have gone through significant changes in the last decade. The labor market has to contend with multiple trends including Job Automation, migration patterns, Jobs redefinition and several other complex trends. In such an environment, companies have to plan and implement unique strategies to talent up across critical enterprise functions. In this key note, we will present interesting labor market trends and some unique strategies companies have successfully adapted with withstand disruption.

The future of services development and delivery will be powered by deep tech such as AI/ML, AR/VR, advanced interfaces, blockchain, etc. Increasingly, there is a need for seamless end-to-end services, where organizations need respond to unpredictability and to also anticipate the future. How will the current state of cloud architecture need to evolve, in order to make this possible? What are some of the cloud antipatterns to be avoided to ensure scale across the entire ecosystem for possibilities that are here and now, and some that are more futuristic? This interesting fireside chat has two industry veterans discussing all these and much more.

Sitting on that executive chair, staring out of the glass window of that corner office, how often do you think leaders have second thoughts about the impact they have made on the world, the legacy they are leaving behind? Have they brought any significant change that translated into an individual’s life for good? Have their actions traversed beyond the corporate world?

Attend this thought-provoking keynote talk by Dr. Anand Deshpande and get insights into his moment of epiphany, his journey, and his vision.

We live in an age where technologies like AI/ML and computer vision are advancing at an unprecedented pace and autonomous cars are no longer a surreal theory. This means that those long traffic congestions that your GPS indicates almost every day, might become a thing of the past. Cars will be able to communicate with each other and share traffic information thereby enabling free-flowing traffic.

This session will have an expert discussing the technologies that enable a seamlessly integrated and automated transport system, marking the end of frantic honking, stressful congestions, and most importantly, accidents.

When money was created, our planet had just two million people. Human society has evolved since then, and undergone rapid technological progress, with exponential changes happening in just the last couple of decades. There has been a tremendous transformation in the way we earn, consume, buy, sell and pay for goods and services. As a result, our perception of money, and of its value, is also undergoing a radical change.

Today, there are over seven billion people, 1.7 billion of whom lack access to formal financial services and billions more for whom the traditional financial system simply does not work. With rising economic challenges, coupled with the legal and political systems struggling to keep up with technology, we are at a crossroads. We need to now fundamentally rethink our current economic systems, the fin-tech landscape, and perhaps even our social contracts, in order to build trust again in the monetary system.

Simply put, we need to reimagine new money.

This session will focus on the fundamental drivers of monetary change, potential impacts, and how individuals and businesses can embrace the radical future of money and make the world a better place for all of us.

There is no greater challenge for a leader than breaking new ground. Whether it's in Engineering decisions, starting or acquiring new businesses, developing new partnerships or tackling new markets, the combination of high uncertainty and unknown returns all make for an intense mix.

Old school methods and following the rules, especially in the era of digital disruption, may no longer be the mantra for success. Can breaking the rules make you a better leader? Should a leader encourage rebels who will break rules to explore new ideas and create positive change? What is the opportunity cost of breaking groupthink? How does one balance new and audacious ideas with the organizations larger goal/purpose? These are just some of the questions that will be explored during this session.

In the digital era, enterprises are focusing on strategies that will enable scalable growth. In most cases, enterprises would consider replicating their competitor’s strategy or rely on the tried and tested mantra as the safest bet to augment growth. However, with the unprecedented scale of digital disruptions happening, such old strategies become irrelevant and turn into a recipe for failure.

In this enthralling panel discussion, experienced leaders will share their experiences on how they enabled the growth story for their companies and the multi-focus growth approach that companies need to consider to be successful in the digital age.

Breaking boundaries could either be literally or figuratively, and we are most definitely talking about the latter in this series of compelling talks. This set of high impact talks features individuals who have chosen to live life on their own terms, breaking barriers and boundaries set by either the society, the corporate world, their family, or even their appearance. These resourceful and enterprising individuals set out to draw their own boundaries, and have succeeded in leaving a significant mark on this world, for the better. All three featured speakers are distinguished in their own right, and are here to share their experiences, insights, learnings, and the X factor in their life that brought them to this point in their lives. Gear up for an exciting set of talks that will leave you enthralled at the least, and inspired at the most!

Breaking boundaries could either be literally or figuratively, and we are most definitely talking about the latter in this series of compelling talks. This set of high impact talks features individuals who have chosen to live life on their own terms, breaking barriers and boundaries set by either the society, the corporate world, their family, or even their appearance. These resourceful and enterprising individuals set out to draw their own boundaries, and have succeeded in leaving a significant mark on this world, for the better. All three featured speakers are distinguished in their own right, and are here to share their experiences, insights, learnings, and the X factor in their life that brought them to this point in their lives. Gear up for an exciting set of talks that will leave you enthralled at the least, and inspired at the most!

2018 was the year of the unicorns. With more than 10 Indian start-ups entering the prestigious $1Bn valuation club last year, India is making its mark as a hub for large successful start-up ventures.

What are the pull factors that enable India’s journey to become the unicorn capital of the world? Is India’s huge demographic dividend favoring the breakneck speed at which Unicorns grow and expand? Is India’s digital infrastructure enabling rapid value creation? This fireside chat will bring in a multifaceted analysis by why India has tremendous potential to become the Unicorn capital of the world.

In the digital economy, companies must interweave business processes, not just internally, but also externally with partners and customers. In the increasingly interconnected world, the ecosystem is playing a key role in bringing businesses, customers, and partners together to drive business growth. It is no secret that businesses that can leverage these emerging digital ecosystems will thrive.

This panel will discuss the key role that a company can play in an ecosystem, how to build and grow collaboration within the ecosystem, and how to future-proof the ecosystem as a whole.

Hear from an experienced engineering and business leader on accelerating business transformation for your organization and how to make the shift from product to platforms. In today’s world, every company needs to think like a software company—every company is a platform company. Learn how to build world-class teams and achieve lasting change.

Recent years have witnessed tremendous growth in Artificial Intelligence-based applications and technology use cases. From self-driving cars to voice assistants, from recommending stocks to traders to tagging names on photos on social media, AI is being leveraged to derive value out of data at an unprecedented scale and accuracy. While AI is grabbing headlines, the state of the art of AI in the literature is demonstrated on “clean” data. But such clean data rarely exists in industry. Substantial amount of time and effort is needed to get the data in the correct order to perform any analysis on it.

This session will focus on some of the challenges faced in deploying ML and automation solutions in the Financial Services industry.

Key Takeaways:

• Brief overview of AI in Financial services
• Challenges that stakeholders face in deploying automation
• An academician’s perspective of AI in the industry

The quote, “What got you here won’t get you there,” by famed author and coach, Marshall Goldsmith, outlines the shortcomings that organizations are facing in today’s increasingly disruptive world. Previously adopted strategies and tactics by organizations in their journey to achieve scale are proving to be unsuccessful in the digital era. Today, technologies related to Connectivity, Data, and Intelligence are coming to the forefront as defining factors for organizations to achieve scale and fast-paced growth.

This masterclass will address these defining factors which add value to an organization in the early stages of discerning product-market fit, or at a more mature stage when enterprises are scrambling for market dominance. The discussion will cover:

• Impact on product design and development in the age of Blitzscaling
• Case studies showcasing customer journey in areas such as connectivity and data science (including telemetry), analytics (including capability enhancements via AI and ML) etc.
• Deriving growth through defined processes and practices to build a digitally connected system

• Achieving blitzscale through Connectivity, Data, and Intelligence
• Customer journey and associated value movement
• Building blocks of a digitally fit and data-ready product

Microservices is one of the trending topics in engineering space, and tech giants like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Uber have adopted the concept of Microservices in their organizations. Now, multiple traditional organizations are latching on to this concept to enhance their speed and agility. Should your organization consider switching from a monolithic to a Microservices architecture?

This session is aimed at offering insights to decision makers and influencers to objectively assess if their organization should move to a Microservices architecture or not. It throws light on various obvious and less explored hidden business aspects that need to be factored in to decide if Microservices is the ‘make or break’ factor for any business. The session helps in calculating the long term ROI of a Microservices migration and its possible pitfalls.

Key Takeaways:

• Decision Framework for Microservices Migration
• Long term ROI of Microservices architecture
• Steps for Microservices adoption
• Assessing organizational readiness
• Case studies / Examples

RPA is fast scaling as an enterprise wide technology and over 5000 large enterprises have already committed investments in this area. The confluence of cognitive technologies & RPA is creating massive new opportunities for enterprises to reap automation related benefits. This masterclass is aimed at providing an in-depth view of such use cases, key best practices and enterprise readiness for RPA adoption. Come and learn from the experts on how are digital workers (aka software robots) enhancing the enterprise productivity, how to think about this technology holistically and how to take that first step that matters the most.

• Why do most PoCs fail to be deployment or integrated?
• Why do most joint go-to-market or alliance partnerships yield insignificant revenue?
• How can odds of success be improved?
• What are potential pitfalls one should be aware of?
• What are possible best practices?

With a rapidly growing ecosystem, every GCC needs to upskill and upscale their talent pool. Digitalizing the HR function has been the trend in the recent past that most GCCs have deployed in order to manage scale. An oxymoron in itself, does that take the human out of human resources? Maybe the right formula is a mix of both human as well as a healthy dose of digital. However, there are various other strategies and measures that can shift the mindsets of organizations from counting heads to making heads count.

This masterclass will discuss ‘the evolving talent strategy in the ever-growing GCC ecosystem,’ how blitzscaling talent is no more just an option for a GCC, but imperative to manage scale and accelerate growth. It will also discuss the key challenges faced by most organizations in their growth journey and how automation in HR can accelerate growth.

The discussion will cover:

• Talent strategies to manage scale
• Digitalization of talent – what works and what doesn’t
• How workplace environments are changing
• Co-working spaces and other trends that are catching on
• Skill availability and development maturity of workforce
• Enhancing employee experience by fostering an inclusive and enabling workplace culture

Ever wonder if Customer Centricity really has a telling impact on the organization? Find that answer and many others during this masterclass.

The session is designed to be a quick overview of the various goals that Customer Centricity can help fulfil, to deliver an understanding of what it entails as a process and to gauge the impact it can have on an organization.

It will allow you to assess for yourself how customer-focused your company is and give you a broad framework on how you might set yourself up for success.

The Internet was intended to be a global network that enabled communications, commerce, and engagement sans geographical boundaries. After initially fulfilling that promise, we are now seeing an Internet that is increasingly facing censorship, traffic snooping, and prone to disruption due to failure of services controlled by a small set of organizations/governments. Further, the dream of the digital web is riddled with data breaches and data misuse. The advent of decentralization technologies has brought the promise of re-architecting the Web from ground up to be resilient against such threats, and the one that puts the users in control of the privacy and security of their data.

Key Takeaways:

• What is driving the decentralized revolution?
• How is the decentralized Internet and Web evolving from ground up and what the future looks like?
• What are the building blocks that will shape this decentralized future?