WE NOW HAVE THE TWIN-ENGINE JET OF AI AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Nitin Rakesh, CEO & Managing Director, Mphasis, talks about business in the post-pandemic world, the oncoming age of AI and where we stand in India's Mission 2047. Edited excerpts from an exhaustive interview...

- Sunil Rajguru

On changes in the post-pandemic era… The number one question everybody’s asking me is: Did enterprises spend too much and are we going backwards? My simple answer to that is: The tech investing super cycle that pulled digital transformation forward is not going away.

I have not had a single CIO come to me and say: We are entering a recession and I’m going to reverse my cloud migration… or I’m spending too much on cybersecurity… or we’re entering a recession and customer is no longer important. They are not killing projects, because they’re not important but because they don’t have the money.

I’m still waiting for the recession we were promised two years ago. Because if you are in a recession, there is a playbook. If you’re in a growth environment, there’s no playbook. There’s very little you can do about uncertainty. I think the trends that got kicked off and accelerated during Covid don’t look like they’ve disappeared. They may have slowed down now.

There is no new abnormal anymore. This is the new normal. Every business will continue to get tech-enabled and digitized. Now add on top of that the additional pivot of this new super tool called AI. Think of it as a new platform.

To sum it up, the consumer journey is not going away. Every business is a consumer business, and you will continue to digitise every part of the business. Cloud is an infrastructure. Consumer is a digital business transformation pivot. Then, we have we just entered an age where you have a whole new set of capabilities that are being unlocked with AI that will accelerate this trifecta. They all blend into each other. One thing AI will do is definitely boost productivity. We are entering a whole new era or golden times for anybody who can enable this.