Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Cloud Computing, Big Data, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality - are all a reality in today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, when a few years ago, they were mere buzzwords. From the time of Ada Lovelace to Elon Musk, technology has evolved leaps and bounds beyond anyone’s imagination. From self-driving cars to paper diagnostics to designer antibiotics to ingestible microbots to nanobots to smart clothing, the future of technology sure seems exciting and terrifying in equal parts. While Quantum Computing and Edge Computing are technological buzzwords of the future that are being bandied about, will the technologies of today be relevant in, say 2020? Will AI/ML even be relevant by 2025, or would they be obsolete? What does the future hold in terms of technological advancements? These and other pertinent questions will be explored in this keynote talk.

The Smart City project has been envisioned to be able to make a city run more efficiently than ever, cater to a much larger population, and be self-correctable in the long term. But how far have we come in the dream and noise of creating one? What are the specific problem areas that companies are solving for? Where are the opportunities? What are the challenges? Infrastructure, healthcare, hygiene, and education have always been the most important aspects of any large city’s overall well-being. Do we have ready examples where we can see serious progress and emulate those for other cities? Is it possible to put realistic timelines when these cities will be up and standing? Many of these questions around the Smart City dream will be addressed in this enthralling panel.

Everyone likes a good story. However, is storytelling still a competitive advantage to the corporate leaders in the world that is being disrupted by Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data and Analytics? This talk makes a strong case for why leaders and managers need to focus on the art of storytelling more than ever. It would walk you through why storytelling alone would work in the age of automation and numbers, and bring out more of people’s creativity and play a critical role in innovation and rekindle their passion for excellence. How to tell a story in a most effective and efficient way? What should we watch out for as a storyteller, listener, and decision maker? What is the science behind the art of storytelling? This very exciting talk reflects on these questions and possible solutions which affect us all.

"If you can’t listen, your actions may be quite useless." Leaders need to be more of listeners than doers. And this is something that doesn’t come naturally to a majority of people, and leaders are no exception. People get so lost in their own ideas and narrow focus, they forget that others may have very different perspectives and far easier solutions. They can miss out on important signals that customer behavior and trends are giving about their products and go marching on with their product development yearly plans. Agile and DevOps have improved the situation to a great level on the process side, but changing characteristics of individual leaders is by far, much harder. Is the art of listening key for leadership? What aspects of this should a leader know and how should they implement it in their life? Who teaches the leader? This panel talks about these and other questions about building the next-generation country leader.

Some studies estimate that 75% of businesses will be digital by 2020. On the flipside, there will be a global shortage of 38-40 million college-educated employees by 2020. The future holds a wide gap between supply and demand of skilled talent across the globe. To add to this, this is the most multi-generational workforce in history, requiring a greater diversity of development needs, experience, expectations, and skills. Crisis yields opportunity, and the challenge to educate and develop tomorrow’s workforce is one that all businesses need to actively be involved in as well as invest in. Just as the way organizations cultivate and acquire talent must evolve to keep pace with the fluidity of a new wave of technology market demands, the workforce must evolve from point-in-time learning to continual learning, acquiring new and relevant skills and expertise. How will the organizational dynamics need to be transformed, with Gen Y and Gen Z employees entering the workforce? Are organizations ready to cater to the needs of a multi-generational workforce? What processes and changes do organizations need to make for Gen X and Babyboomers to work in tandem with Gen Y and Gen Z? This panel will delve deep into these questions and provide insights into how organizations can transform their workforce.

Nearly 61 per cent of C-suite executives of Indian firms believe that their organizational decisions are highly data-driven compared to the global benchmark of around 40 per cent, cites a report. Using data analytics in business is a great way to move up the ladder of success, with data-driven insights helping business owners take important strategic decisions. The minute you reflect on data insights, new ideas start pouring in and immediately you know your next move. Not only can you improve productivity by shifting from manual to automated processes, you’ll find a significant change in profitability too. That’s the power of big data and analytics, which can be leveraged by organizations across the board. And India as a country is one gigantic pool of data with clusters of it available for the picking, if only you know how to leverage it. But how can organizations leverage the huge data that 1.4 billion people generate? What kind of talent needs to be attracted to make sense of this vast data? How will it affect organizations’ top line? These and other pertinent questions are answered in this exciting and timely keynote talk.

In the last 3 years, Zinnov has conducted detailed research on ML/AI use cases that are evolving and are beginning to have real impact across different industry segments. However, there are some real challenges that are causing AI initiatives to remain as pilots for a longer time. This presentation will focus on sharing outcomes of Zinnov research and learnings from building DRAUP, to decipher how enterprises can scale ML initiatives from Models to Outcomes, and steering businesses on the road to a data- and science-driven approach to enterprise decision-making.

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!

Abstract of the session - Technology is changing faster than our ability to learn it. Global Innovation Centers are evolving rapidly from being centers of cost arbitrage to becoming drivers of business value and centres of excellence for future technology skills for their parent companies. A key driver of this evolution is the ability to reskill their workforce at scale on a set of future technologies that matter to industries that their parent organizations operate in. This Masterclass will help GIC technology and skill development leaders to establish a technology learning framework that will always keep them future-skills ready.

Key takeaways for the attendees

• Gain insights from the Zinnov-Pluralsight Next-Gen Skills report for the Indian IT industry
• Get access to usable frameworks on translating a Future-Tech Strategy into a Skills Strategy
• Get a ‘How-to’ perspective from GIC leaders who have implemented this in their organization
• Learn from your peers on their experiences in becoming Next-Gen Skills-ready

Abstract of the session - Lots of funds are being made available for digital transformation and there is no lack of effort to transform. However, there is a lot of misguided effort. This session will describe common anti-patterns of digital transformation and suggest ways to remedy them.

Key takeaways for the attendees

• Understand the drivers, size, and scope of digital transformation efforts in the industry as a whole.
• Glean insights on non-intuitive anti-patterns of digital transformation and their remedies from the first-hand experience of an expert.
• Avoid expensive mistakes by learning from the mistakes of others.

Abstract of the session -Women have historically faced many a struggle across industries and sectors to make their mark. However, the tide has turned in the recent past, with women making great strides toward changing the future. And tech is one area of specific interest, as it’s a place where women have traditionally been under-represented.

Statistics show that women prioritize the skills that employers seek and gain proficiency in the languages most in-demand. However, despite this fact, the sad truth is that women of all ages are more likely to hold junior positions than their male counterparts. There is a distinct dearth of women in senior positions even in 2018.

This session is a masterclass to help women technologists garner a more well-rounded perspective on what it takes to build a successful tech career. How to think about technology, how to integrate design thinking in technology across the board, learn to articulate their contributions as well as ask for what they believe they deserve.

Key takeaways for the attendees

• 1. Understanding the importance of integrating design thinking in technology
• 2. Thriving, not just surviving, in the tech industry – thinking business, creating code
• 3. How to build right relationships, in the right manner

Abstract of the session -A secure identity is central to our digital, connected life today. The cost of acquiring, managing, proving, and securing identities runs into billions of dollars globally. As high-profile data breaches have shown, centralized identity providers also become attractive targets for hackers. In this session, we will understand how the identity ecosystem can be made more secure, more efficient, and less expensive using Blockchain. Even more importantly, how individuals can have more control on their identity attributes using decentralized design. We will learn about the emerging decentralized identity standard, and how this work can be used in broader credentialing use cases such as educational certificates, accredited memberships, and other generalized credentials.

Key takeaways for the attendees

• Learn about the challenges of current identity systems
• Learn about how decentralized identity is evolving and what the future looks like
• Understand the stakeholders, workflows and key elements in a decentralized identity and credentialing future

Abstract of the session -Traditional software development projects have always been executed by IT professionals, as it should be. However, this has, over time, created a certain ‘mindset’ in execution. The business user’s expectations from the developer community to deliver these projects have also been that of the conventional cookie cutter methods. However, as most data practitioners would know, data projects do not fall under this category or follow the traditional software development lifecycle in the way it is executed. It needs to be more agile, more nimble in the way it adapts to the newer technologies, newer business user expectations.

When a community of professionals with traditional SDLC mindset take up data projects, there is a tendency to force-fit the data projects into the traditional mold, leading to conflicts, chaos, and misinformed expectations. It’s akin to forcing a square peg in a round hole.
In this session, we will highlight the key differences in the lifecycle and share the best practices learned to address these conflicts. It will also help in looking at fundamentally changing the mindset of developers as well as business users to better map out the roles on both sides.

Key takeaways for the attendees

• Understanding what it takes to build a data science ecosystem from scratch
• Addressing challenges faced by data practitioners who deal with an ecosystem of professionals with a traditional SDLC mindset

Abstract of the session -Rapid digitalization is transforming the global business landscape at an unprecedented speed. To survive in this dynamic environment, innovation is key. Innovation is a paradigm that assumes that corporates can and should use external as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology or innovating with partners by sharing risk and reward equitably.

Over the years, the boundaries between a corporate and its ecosystem have become more permeable; innovations can easily transfer inward and outward. The central idea behind corporate innovation is that in a world of widely distributed knowledge, companies cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research but should instead buy or license processes or inventions (i.e. patents) from other companies.

One way to boost corporate innovation is to collaborate with technology start-ups. It can benefit both sides, helping corporates to enter and create new markets, and start-ups to develop their products, and to scale: chief executive officers of both corporates and start-ups share the common strategic goals of growing their company, improving its competitive positioning, and generating revenue. Even partnerships with potential disruptors can be beneficial because of the difficulty for an established business to disrupt from within.

• How do you drive effective start-up collaborations for creating tangible business impact by
  • Sharing the risks
  • Opportunities for growth
  • Leveraging each partner’s core strengths
  • Accessing resources in form of talent, technology and markets
  Access new markets
• What are the potential landmines that could hinder these collaboration opportunities?
• What are some of the myths surrounding start-up – corporate collaborations?
• Why is the term ‘corporate innovation’ raise the hackles of skeptics?
• How important is it to corporate innovation to stay relevant in the current times?