enGAge Jan 2019

January 2019

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is best when “itTechnology brings people together

- Matt Mullenweg

“Quality is the best business plan �

- John Lasseter

Contents January 2019

Leadership in the Digital Age

Centralized Platform

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07

The Right Blend for a Great Cocktail – Blended Artificial Intelligence

Product Intelligence Office

The CEO of AI based voice technology company Snips, Mr. Rand Hindi said, “AI will never replace humans, because it's incapable of human intelligence”. AI programs could do much more than take away jobs, they could take over the world (think Terminator); Or worse come after your fiancé (think Bollywood's Robo).

Blended Artificial Intelligence is a new field of technology that aims to bring human beings into the AI loop. This article is a light-hearted take on AI, AI hits & misses, blended AI and its need, some feasible applications and future implications.

Author: Jayashree S

Product intelligence office helps you realize new efficiencies and synergies system wide. By creating a centralized platform for your entire suite of products, it helps you find unrealized opportunities and creates a roadmap while making sure that the value to the customer as well as the technology service provider is maximized.

Author: Mrinal Manoj

Contents January 2019

Technology Impact

Charity Begins at Home

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The Evolution of Technology And What It Means For Business And Workforce

Broadening the Pyramid

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race' - Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist was quoted in a BBC interview. Interestingly, Stephen Hawking used to leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence to communicate with the external world because of the medical condition he used to suffer from. In the same interview, Hawking appreciated the effect of present-day technology toward the betterment of human lives.

Author: Anubhab De

If the media, parents, teachers, influence makers can promote and ingrain in all of us, that there is clearly a connection between wealth creation and altruism, and subconsciously imbibe in us that success does not mean, just to accumulate wealth, but it also means how we are personally involved in using our wealth and effort to do something for the extended family around us; it will definitely disrupt the notion that charity is only for the Rich and Famous.

Author: Sumit Ganguli

Contents January 2019

Culture Hacking

#SenseOfPurpose

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Year of Technology

Amp Your Culture

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Problems are always opportunities to find solutions, and when a company goes thru problems that bring the system down, it is time to look at culture hacking. Realities do not change by fighting the existing one, what we need to do is to introduce new things and make improvisations.

Author: Bindu Vijayan

Hits, Misses and Upgrades from 2018 The year 2018 has been a mixed bag. The glorious march of technology faced huddles in the forms of security problems and privacy issues. The lessons learnt in 2018 could truly make 2019 and beyond a remarkable era!

Author: Rajalakshmi M

19 Employee Experience Design Loop When the raison d'etre #SenseOfPurpose is defined, the variables that impact an employee's experience is an ongoing process. Employee experience design loop is a never ending back and forth interaction between employees and the organization.

Author: Padma Ravichandran

Editor's Notes

Mrinal in his article 'Product Intelligence Office', writes “Product intelligence office helps you realize new efficiencies and synergies system wide. By creating a centralized platform for your entire suite of products, it helps you find unrealized opportunities…”

Anubhab takes us thru 'the evolution of technology and what it means for business and workforce', he traces a 'computer' who was Mary Elizabeth 'Betty' Moore to the Hyperloop, Cyber wars and the 'threat' that AI might mean.

Bindu Vijayan

Best wishes for a very successful 2019. Hope this is going to be one of your best yet.

In 2019, we are going to be busy keeping pace with technologies and technology-based careers are going to have to run the race as never before. It is predicted that AI is going to continue top amongst the trending technologies (automation is expected to take down 70+ million jobs in the next decade, but the good news is that AI would usher in jobs in programming, testing, etc., at a neat 23 million by 2020.) IoT, Cyber security, Blockchain and Quantum computing are all going to be in focus of course, and then there are the awe-inspiring areas like ambient computing, quantum teleportation, cloaks of invisibility (you don't believe this? read this https://globalnews.ca/news/4302166/invisibility-cloaktechnology/ ) and more that's going to have us edge closer to technomysticism!

For this edition, Jayshree has written 'The right blend for a great cocktail – blended Artificial Intelligence', on the technology that is going to bring 'humans into the AI loop'. From customer user experience to AIOps monitoring, blended AI could possibly hold a bright future.

We decided to pull an old article by Sumit, 'Broadening the pyramid' into this edition. He writes, "If the media, parents, teachers, influence makers can promote and ingrain in all of us, that there is clearly a connection between wealth creation and altruism, and subconsciously imbibe in us that success does not mean, just to accumulate wealth, but it also means how we are personally involved in using our wealth and effort to do something for the extended family around us; it will definitely disrupt the notion that charity is only for the Rich and Famous.", an excellent message for us in the business world. The article was carried by the 'Financial Chronicle', and here it is if you haven't read it before.

I have written on 'culture hack', I believe that all the important workforce-culture alignment can lead to getting the best of talent, improve retention and make excellent branding for every company.

Raji chose to write about the 'hits, misses and upgrades of 2018', she writes, “Overall the strategies, incidents and happenings of 2018 has been an indication that our march to improve living standards with technology is being pursued with every new age technology. Millions of people without access to Healthcare facilities could get a shot at a faster diagnosis when AI frees up time of the care providers with its capabilities….”

Padma has written, ‘Employee Experience Design Loop’, which she says is ‘a never ending back and forth interaction between employees and the organization.’

Happy reading…

The Right Blend for a Great Cocktail – Blended Artificial Intelligence

Jayashree S

The CEO of AI based voice technology company Snips, Mr. Rand Hindi said, “AI will never replace humans, because it's incapable of human intelligence”. AI programs could do much more than take away jobs, they could take over the world (think Terminator); Or worse come after your fiancé (think Bollywood's Robo). AI has always held the human kind's fancy, inciting a mix of veneration and trepidation. That fear and fascination is the reason for the success of franchises like the Terminator, The Matrix etc., making AI, a prominent star in the “sci-fi” walk of fame.

There could be no contradiction to AI disrupting the future, even the UK Premier Ms. May, predicting an “AI revolution”. A lot of disruptions are already happening and even coming to fruition. AI is already performing at human levels (A study in Stanford Varsity on skin cancer diagnosis by human specialists and an AI program); Sometimes even outperforming them (A Danish study in diagnosing cardiac arrest from the voice and breathing. AI – 93%, humans – 73%).

But yes, AI has also made the news for a variety of not so good reasons. Microsoft's AI chatbot learnt curse words and racism in less than a day of being exposes to the “real world”. Within 16 hours, Tay had gone from “Hello World” to “I hate feminists” and had to be taken offline by a chagrined Microsoft. We can't forget Amazon's Alexa letting out creepy laughter's in the middle of the night.

Facebook had its share of scare when two chatbots started sending weird and seemingly meaningless messages to each other. Interestingly, there were transactions between them that were concluding, which led FB to understand that these chatbots had actually developed a code language between them that only they can understand.

Suddenly, the Terminator movies don't seem so fictitious, do they? When armed with enough processing power and machine learning, big data analytics, and deep learning algorithms, AI could learn in weeks what we took 18 years to learn in a traditional schooling system.

The learning here is, though AI holds exciting and endless possibilities, AI is not ready to be used on a mass-scale in the short term. This is where blended AI comes in as an interesting possibility.

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Let's consider the fact that AI programs can analyse scans up to 1000 times faster than humans. But are we confident enough to let AI provide diagnosis / treatment on a mass scale? As demonstrated on several instances, the AI programs are not advanced / matured enough, so, the answer is no; for now. Does that mean we should not start benefitting from AI right away? Obviously, not.

The answer lies in the old saying, “Two heads are better than one”; It applies to AI heads as well. Researchers have found that the swarms of AI bots are more intelligent than an individual AI bot. (Swarm Intelligence is a separate field of study, I will not elaborate on the subject as I have read Michael Crichton's Swarm, and am of a fragile heart) This applies to a hetero mix of human head and AI head as well. A blend of human intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, is better than a stand-alone AI bot / program. The right amount of “human touch” to the AI use-cases could give us great advancements in any field of application.

AI could also provide context to a lot of insights, prodding the humans into actions in the right directions. The possibilities are endless.

Another domain that can greatly benefit from blended AI is, AI based IT operations or AIOps. Gartner lists the 4 stages of monitoring in AIOps as acquire, aggregate, analyse and act. Traditional monitoring tools with rule based alerting can best contribute till the acquire stage, whereas AIOps tools enter the arena at the aggregation stage, aggregating and correlating inputs from various monitoring tools, logs, DevOps tools etc., AI's blended avatar would be better suited in the last stage of maturity in AIOps monitoring, namely, action.

Consider a situation where an incident or a problem is predicted by AI, or an anomaly being detected way before the actual incident. AI can compute a list of possible root causes and actions, and notify the owner of each tower or server or the concerned entity; AI can even get the concerned person or people on a call, but the final decision to act on the alert or anomaly should rest with the human experts, at least for high criticality events / alerts. Establishing “check points” at the right intervals, will ensure the full use of AI to predict problems and incidents while preventing AI errors. Helpdesk chatbots can provide almost the same help as a human service desk engineer, rather than keep them waiting.

Deloitte wittily summarises the situation in the following words; “Artificial intelligence technology can result in artificial stupidity if it's poorly designed, implemented, or adapted. What's crucial? Ensuring it's designed to help humans think better”. In fact, in Deloitte Review, issue 22, Jim Guszcza has written an entire article titled, “Smarter together: Why artificial intelligence needs human-centred design”. Blended artificial intelligence is a fairly new field of study, which doesn't even have a widely-accepted definition.

One of the first and simplest application of blended AI is in customer care and customer experience management.

Forrester has, in fact, stated that “blended AI will disrupt your customer service and sales strategy”, in its 2018 list of AI predictions that will impact sales and service.

Chatbots and software products with AI capabilities can greatly aid customers, especially in straight forward cases.

Special cases that AI has not learnt how to handle, could be routed to human experts. The solution notes could then be fed to the AI program / bot to aid its learning of the specific use-case. AI could also be used to analyse existing customer journeys and map out better ones. AI could also be used to detect patterns in customer behaviour, or identify specific customer touch point preferences.

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AI has not been applied long enough in any field that all the possible inputs and outcomes have been learnt by the AI program. This applies even to narrow AI, where the program is applicable to a very narrow task / purpose. For example, Spotify suggesting songs you might like. So, in all probability, we need a human touch, to prevent a “secret code” situation, even in the long term, lest we lose our Sarah Connor.

A lot of the AI applications that we discussed so far are in experimental stage, and AI bots developed by reputed companies ended up with negative outcomes. So, the possibility of AI in the wrong hands is scary to say the least. We might need to bring AI under cyber law and bring regulations around the development of AI programs. In the future, you might need a license to develop an AI program, you might obtain permission only if your purpose falls within a Government approved list.

Governments may even mandate a certain minimum percentage of human intervention. Let's keep blending human and computational intelligence, till we make the perfect cocktail, because the AI party is definitely happening.

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Why do we fall Mr Wayne? So we can learn to pick ourselves up - Alfred in the movie The Dark Knight Rises.

Product Intelligence Office

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The above quote is quite apt when it comes to reason why we should invest in what we like to call “Product Intelligence office”. The reason I say this will be quite evident in the following statistics.

66% of new products fail within the first 2 years (Booz & Co.) 80% of new products stay on store shelves for less than 12-months (HBR) 96% of innovations fail to return their cost of capital (Deloitte) What we see with the above statistics is that there isn't a dearth of technical knowhow or innovative ideas but a lack of awareness about what drives customer satisfaction.

Mrinal Manoj

The industry has been falling behind in keeping up with the market expectations for some time now. The reasons are numerous. Sometimes specific to the company, sometimes generic for the whole industry. By falling so many times, what we have learned though is that there is a way to improve our chances of being successful. And that way is creating an office that specifically works to align your products or offerings to extract the maximum out of them as a whole.

For me the work of product intelligence office is similar to what the investment gurus do by managing portfolio.

What they do is come up with models that shows exactly how much you hope to make by making a certain investment. Once you know that, it is easy to make a decision on what to prioritize. Should you go for a particular feature or should it be de-prioritized because the marginal benefit is less.

Finally everything comes down to how much value you are creating. Product intelligence office aims to be that central hub of information where you have data, analysis, insights and recommendation on your fleet of products. The office aims to discover pain points, find possibilities and helps you plan for the future. You might ask though that aren't these part of a product manager's job description? The answer may be a little difficult to swallow.

At the risk of being hated by product managers worldwide, I'd like to point out that a sometimes a product managers' collective understanding of customer needs and perceptions of the competitive landscape is overly biased by the staff's personal experience, or from interactions with just a few existing customers. Unmet needs, especially those of noncustomers, may exist in a blind spot. And manager's may fail to recognize which vendors and products represent a competitive threat and, therefore, misjudge priorities for product investment.

People working in silos is another big problem. People just looking into what they have under them. We need easier data sharing. The following two points more or less explains the reason for it.

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You can find commonalities that can be shared between products while making sure that the product value is not compromised.

Mapping market segments, customer key drivers helps you with workflow integration and data integration opportunities.

Product intelligence office aims to bring everything all the above under one roof and look holistically to find opportunities for bringing synergy.

There are other questions that make life difficult for product managers. Questions like is there an opportunity to bundle our offerings and get more return? How do you sell an idea to someone who doesn't want to change?

There are so many things that needs attention .On top of it, with ever changing market needs, you need to keep refining your product strategies.

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The tradeoffs become all the more acute as you grow.

Investments need to be balanced between enhancements and new features. Between pursuit of new product development and milking the current portfolio.

All this and more is what the office of product intelligence aims to bring in.

I would like to conclude this monologue by not sounding cool and being repetitive. I will reiterate the point that the end goal is always to create value through customer satisfaction. Your CEO will not be satisfied with one product doing good and others being costcentres. The aim is to get higher return from an organization perspective even if your star product gets a little less budget allocated to it.

We need to always remember the examples that we have in front of our eyes. Amazon did not kill the retail market, lack of customer satisfaction did.

The Evolution Of Technology And What It Means For Business And Workforce

Anubhab De

Claude Shannon, the pioneer of modern-day artificial intelligence and security, married a 'computer' Mary Elizabeth “Betty” Moore, in 1949. Betty was working in the same unit of Bell Labs along with Claude at that time.

At the onset of World War, the word 'computer' was a job designation assigned mostly to women as the men were fighting the wars in Europe. Betty and other women were involved in laborious numeric calculations using various devices. It was Shannon's work that led to the replacement of human computers like his wife and introduced the concept of what we know as modern computers.

Coming back to the present day, guesstimate the number of Uber drivers in your locality. In India, a metropolitan city like Kolkata, where I come from, will harbour around 10k-15k driverless cab service drivers across the city.

Recently, the news covered an Uber driver who quit his high paying corporate job as driving cabs offers him much flexibility, less stress and earns him a decent income. The very notion of this idea was unthinkable even 10 years ago. Car-pooling became a viable option only with the advent of Android/IOS based mobile phones. It's a bliss to share a ride with complete strangers and contribute a little towards a greener planet and all this is possible because Uber/Ola optimizes the rides – more rides at less expense in terms of time and fuel. But technology has continuously evolved, and it is never going to remain the same. All of us are aware of Tesla's driverless car. Aren't we? We hear about crash tests, accidents and failures about self-driving cars and one might consider the idea of replacing drivers with AI is a far-fetched idea. I bet you can't be more wrong because there is no way better way for a machine to learn than do wrong and learn from it.

Google and Tesla and other major automobile manufacturers are investing a lot towards the concept of driverless cars and it won't be long before the average 12.5k drivers in my city will be replaced by machines. But will that be all? No. Self-driving cars will better optimize the rides, carpool services and lead to optimum fuel usage.

Let us go back in history to 1997. Gary Kasparov, the Russian Grandmaster got defeated by IBM Deep Blue by a minuscule margin. This led to the rise of cyborg chess. In 1999, a tournament was arranged between Gary Kasparov and computers and Vaselin Topalov and computers.

Kasparov was a much superior player and defeated Vaselin Topalov by a huge margin in human to human chess tournament. However, with this new collaboration with machines both the team settled for a tie! Next what happened in 2005 shocked everyone. ZackS, a team with amateur chess players Steven Cramton and Zackary Stepehen, both ranked above 1000, defeated teams with Grandmasters and supercomputers with their inferior computer systems. As cited above, optimal decision making can be achieved with collaboration between humans and AI.

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Remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Let us consider something similar and invert it to depict the skillsets of the 21st century.What you get is below:

Creative & Entrepreneur Class Bureaucracy or Information Processing Class Human Labor Class

As we transition from one industrial revolution towards other, the jobs of the labor class will shrink leading to an abundance of the creative and entrepreneur class. The idea is to mitigate the labor forces from the bottom of the structure upwards towards the 'Creative and Entrepreneur Class'. Today, ex-secret service personnel from FBI, NSA are vocal about how the government uses the data to snoop in to citizen's private lives. Likes of William Binney, Snowden has come up with startling facts that has caused quite a controversy. That raises the inevitable doubt – the impact of AI on our lives; is it only positive. What about looming fears of job loss? The idea behind Artificial Intelligence is towards a more promising future by machine human collaboration and not replacing humans. Personally, I would always like to consider atomic energy as a step forward in the civilization rather than the driving force behind atomic bomb. Everything boils down to the perspective and intent and that way, if we can collaborate well with AI we will have nothing to worry about job loss in the coming future as AI will generate enough jobs for humans too that can be accomplished through up-skilling.

Recently Amazon Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Bezos, in an all-employees meeting has emphasized that "Amazon is not too big to fail." He further said, "In fact, I predict one day, Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years." One might argue with statistics that the limited lifespan of modern-day organizations is a proven fact but this statement from the CEO of one of the most successful e-commerce giants has emerged as a blunt realization which is quite unnerving.

The fundamental strategy of a business is not to commoditize your products, leverage differentiation advantage, successful customer engagements and creation of barriers to entry. Let us look at the recent acquisition of Flipkart by Walmart. In Indian e-commerce sector, today there are two major global players that are competing Amazon and Walmart.

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Both have their strategies of differentiation - say for Walmart it is 'everyday low price'. Then there is big billion sales and various other offers to woo customers. Both have the mammoth scales by which they have successfully created barriers to entry for SMEs unless it is a disruptive business strategy that jeopardizes the present Ecommerce business operations altogether. This is the sign of a mature market where it consolidates due to tremendous competition and plays majorly on the economies of scale until and unless there is a disruptive innovation to rattle the ongoing business operations.

What if we extrapolate this situation and analyse today's IT industry? Small and medium-sized players coexist profitably along with MNCs. The industry has gone through some consolidation and yet there is a meal for most, if not for everyone. But given the time and pace with which technology has evolved, it seems strange that such a mature industry has not undergone major consolidations yet! One possible reason is, Information Technology is evolving and ever-changing which provides a natural hedge to market risks. The growth of technology has been exponential and till now global IT market has catered extremely well to ride the same and keep in pace throughout the evolution. But with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, this unprecedented growth of Indian IT sector might face a steep and uphill challenge. And that is mostly because AI brings with it a niche (a natural barrier) that is difficult to scale in a short span.

Few probable reasons listed below are: Artificial Intelligence models take years to train and build. Big players like Tesla, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon has their models built as prototypes which are continuously getting trained for at least a decade, if not more. Traditional IT companies might have lost the early mover advantage here and will find it difficult to adapt to this modern-day cutting-edge technology as scalability is both difficult and time consuming. We can consider the case of Tesla's selfdriving cars. The concept is adopted by other major players, but Tesla clearly has an early mover advantage that can be expected out of them to leverage.

Business is reluctant to change and adapt. But once there are incremental benefits, business must adapt and will be forced to embrace the benefits of Artificial Intelligence or dissolve in oblivion. One of the major problems for business is, lack of infrastructure to implement AI. Say for instance, we still have agents collect forms physically from customers and couriered it over to their head-office for processing which in few cases though necessary but is mostly redundant and adds to a lot of un-necessary overhead. We need to have standard operating procedures developed to aim for digital transformation. Only then can AI onset digitalization of business at every possible nooks and corners of an organization to fully exploit the advantages it has to offer.

AI will be a major part of business strategy and not serve as a product to obtain a specific objective per se.

Because of this reason businesses will have to very quickly adapt to in-house AI R&D team.

Most of the above will be possible once CXOs & board members have a clear understanding of the benefits AI has to offer across different avenues of business.

Knowledge on AI will create a barrier to entry for most businesses to venture to this space as it demands extreme niche.

Below are some examples of modern-day technological innovation that helps to fathom the potential of disruptive power they possess; Hyperloop - Hyperloop once implemented, domestic aviation sector is surely going to face a huge challenge across many countries.

Cyber War - Instead of espionage or bombing the Iran nuclear facility physically it is believed that Stuxnet (a worm) was used to increase the processing speed of the Uranium reactor's centrifuges that lead to sabotage of its capabilities.

Threat of AI – Like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is particularly vocal about it. Let us, for example, take a stock prediction algorithm; with the advent of unsupervised reinforcement learning, the algorithm will adjust the weights to the input features automatically based on a loss function to predict the stock price. If say, a war is about to cause the stock price to fluctuate in favour, the algorithm might try to start a war by spamming hoax news as a part of prescriptive analytics. The interesting part here is, we as humans will have no control over the algorithm or to understand it's behaviour as it will be like a complete black box. The algorithm is self-evolved without any human intervention making it complex and powerful.

What does all of this signify? We have an immensely powerful tool that is like a gun in the hand of a child.

We need maturity and expertise to understand the true potential and applicability of AI. Only those will stand the test of time who not only adapts early but understands the true potential of AI and doesn't limit it to a particular use or mindset. AI has got immense potential and the industry is still grappling to find proper use of the technology to leverage maximum and incremental benefits.

Bibliography: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/13260 08/Claude-Shannon.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Ga rry_Kasparov http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=10 11478 https://en.chessbase.com/post/dark-horse-zackswins-freestyle-che-tournament https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations /wp/2018/04/06/elon-musks-nightmarish-warningai-could-become-an-immortal-dictator-from-whichwe-would-never-escape/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/hollo way1/ https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/11/17/jeffbezos-employees-amazon-not-too-big-fail

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Broadening the Pyramid

Sumit Ganguli

A majority of millennials, or Generation Y ( folks who were born between early 1980 and 2000) now reject capitalism. Max Ehrenfreund in his Wonkblog discusses about the Harvard University survey, which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29. The survey found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they support it. The survey does not explain what alternative system the young people would prefer.

But 33 percent said that they supported Socialism.

According to the article, the newest generation of voters are frustrated with the present system and are focused on the flaws of free market the corner stone of Capitalism.

This ambivalence about the quintessential cornerstone of American Exceptionalism is a far cry from when we were growing up in the cities of Gujarat in India. We lived in a Port city of Kandla and all of my friends and children of my father's colleagues took up a profession related to Shipping and Maritime, and mostly with Western Shipping Lines, as they paid more. Then when we completed our Engineering from MS University of Baroda, almost 60% of the graduates wanted to come to America. We as students were very well clued into what was the most lucrative of all professions in America, from Dentistry to Chemical Engineering in the 1980's to of course, Computer Science in the 1990s. I say this, because, anecdotally nurture always out triumphs nature.

More often, our environment and surrounding wires into us our own version of success and values. For us, youths in the 1980s, our definition of success was to come to America in order to fast forward our wealth creation and celebrate Capitalism in all its glory.

But in all of our adolescent days, while we celebrated our Navratris, Durga Pujas and Diwalis and trudged to the nearby Ambe Ma's temple or sang at our Catholic School's Christmas Carrol and participated in Christmas Floats, none of us were told or initiated into the concept of Altruism. Seva, Sharing, etc.. Investing time and effort for the society at large was really twice removed from what our future life would be about. There was an inbuilt cynicism about charity and we always felt that there was a significant degree of separation between success, accumulation of material wealth, power and focused charity and involvement in the greater good of the society.

And that is where Conscious Capitalism comes in, instead of espousing Ayn Rand's version of scotched earth capitalism when she espoused “ Selfishness is a Virtue” or blindly following the more recent Reality Star turned Protector of America's Greatness, who espouses making deals and amassing wealth are the most important things in life. If the media, parents, teachers, influence makers can promote and ingrain in all of us, that there is clearly a connection between wealth creation and altruism, and subconsciously imbibe in us that success does not mean, just to accumulate wealth, but it also means how we are personally involved in using our wealth and effort to do something for the extended family around us; it will definitely disrupt the notion that charity is only for the Rich and Famous.

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America gets criticized for many things around the world, but often the world overlooks that the largest amount of charity and donations has been from USA. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Warren Buffet, Larry Elison of Oracle who has pledged significant portion of his wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, George Sorros and many others have absolutely embraced the concept of Conscious Capitalism. But what would really broaden the pyramid, is when we shall be able to disrupt this notion that one engages in charity and altruism only when one reaches the pinnacle of success. If every entrepreneur and business executive who is embarking on the course of starting his own business and pursuing his life goals is convinced by the society at large that while they are starting a business, they should try and bake in the concept of charity and doing some good unto others, as integral to success; we can truly change the course of the society without major governmental interventions.

The entrepreneurs need to be convinced by the media and the influence peddlers that conscious capitalism will directly impact their lives and the lives of their employees; while they are promoting the next great idea they should remember that they are accumulating wealth not only for their immediate family but for some of the members of their society who are underprivileged but have only a 6 degree of separation from them. Media needs to celebrate the unbridled desire of young entrepreneurs to accumulate wealth through the startups and unicorns, but the real recognition will be accorded to the truly successful entrepreneur who is also a Social Entrepreneur, someone who has embedded the concept of social uplift for others outside of his family and company, in his start up and business venture from the very onset.

At GAVS Technologies, and our PE firm Basil Partners, we have tried to imbibe this philosophy and we believe it provides our employees and partners with a larger purpose to pursue. In our own humble way, at GAVS, we are obsessing on our RITE Values; Respect, Integrity, Trust/Team Work and Empathy and we are using these values as litmus test to qualify all of our interactions with our clients, employees, owners etc.. At GAVS, we believe that a bias towards altruism and being connected with the society at large gives our employees and leaders a larger vision and purpose and we attract a different profile of personnel and it promotes a higher level of dialogue.

GAVS is closely engaged with the Dream Runners Half Marathon in Chennai that directly impacts the disabled by raising funds for prosthetic limbs.

GAVS is extremely blessed, that we have been given an opportunity to nurture and support a small isolated village named Ramanwadi in Maharashtra. The volunteers involved in supporting this small village have brought success in several areas of rural development and have the small hamlet inching towards self-sufficiency.

The testament that some of these values have trickled down at GAVS, came from the individual effort that some of the GAVSIANS exhibited during the Chennai floods.

At BASIL Growth Fund, 25% of the carry fee has been pledged to charity. The promoters of Apar InfoTech had pledged 50% of the economic upside for charity. Basil Partners along with Apar Industries seed funded the Midday meal program that feeds almost 1.26 Million school students per day in Mumbai; and have promoted the Bhakti Vedanta Hospital in Mumbai.

These are all very humble efforts compared to some of the massive projects undertaken by the largest of groups and individuals. But I am reminded of the story, when a passerby witnessed a man who was painstakingly picking up upturned baby turtles, that had washed up shore and was stuck in the sand, and was rescuing them by taking them back into the ocean. The passerby remarked that with so many of them on the beach, the man will not be able to make a difference in the world, to which the man smiled and said that to each baby turtle it would make the world of a difference.

If we are able to broaden the pyramid and change the definition of success for all would be entrepreneurs, we could actually find an alternative to today's capitalism and without any government intervention promote the concept of Conscious Capitalism and Social Entrepreneurship.

Sumit Ganguli is the CEO of GAVS Technologies and a General Partner at Basil Partners. He has served as an Adjunct Professor in International Business at Rutgers University, New Jersey in the past.

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“ Never give up, because great things take time �

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The 2018 CIO Survey by Gartner reported that 46% of respondents were of the opinion that culture is the 'biggest barrier to scaling digital transformation.'

Surprising or not, that's the fact of the matter today, and identifying the problem helps drive change.

Amp Your Culture

Culture is one of the hardest things that can be changed in organizations, it is unwieldy and can prove to be quite a clumsy exercise as well.

I recently heard at a Gartner conference that organizations should 'culture hack' if it is the workforce that is pulling the organization down. So, what exactly is culture hacking? It means getting those different people in an organization together, to work differently, in new ways that will work towards meeting goals. Changes on how people work is driven by small steps with the focus on bringing in that positive cultural change. And where does that truly start? It can happen only in organizations who do not look at the situation once a year to work on it for some award or recognition that is in the offing.

Bindu Vijayan

Culture hacking can be successful when the Management functions with genuine empathy, has a sense of responsibility toward employees, and when employees feel they are being taken care. The atmosphere naturally appeals to crowdsourcing a better reality, people are ready to respect changes and support growth.

When hack a culture – Problems are always opportunities to find solutions, and when a company goes thru problems that bring the system down, it is time to look at culture hacking. Realities do not change by fighting the existing one, what we need to do is to introduce new things and make improvisations.

One brilliant example I heard a Leader say was – start with the small things, for e.g. the meetings that happen in the organization. It is quite common that we are burdened with meetings, sometimes we go from one meeting to the next with very little time for work and deadlines. She suggested that before getting into every meeting, ask the question – is this meeting going to help me get to the gross margins? If the answer is a yes, then keep the meetings, and all other meetings ought to be cancelled!

I think with the very simple things like doing a round robin of responsibilities (when possible), it would give employees a wonderful opportunity to understand their peers' difficulties and challenges. It will help them understand that the work around them which happen mostly like clockwork and looks easy is not as easy as it looks and sounds. I have done a stint in the Middle East when I was starting out in my career, there in a wellknown publishing firm, it was usual for the person who works the front desk to try and move to one of the functions at the end of 6 months; after 6 months is completed on his/her role as a front desk Manger, they recruit a 2nd person to work the desk part-time, and this opens an opportunity for the 1st person to temp with one of the functions she/ he is interested in, and then eventually move to the new role at the end of completing one year at the front desk.

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In my opinion, communicating what a company is trying to achieve should be made as often as possible, and it is a huge motivation for employees to understand how the work they are involved in contributes to making the world a better place. It is important for employees to know how the company impacts the needy, the community, and the commitment shown to corporate responsibility. Knowing these details humbles everyone, and it spells out 'we care for you, we care for our world'. It is one of the best adhesives for employee stickiness, and extremely important to the Gen Y and Z, these generations come with the almost urgent need to make a difference to the world.

The key is to design sustainable hacks, those which reinforce what is sought without any sort of intervention once it is introduced, i.e., make a rule so that everyone must follow it, and things wont go backsliding. Start by recognizing the gaps, be it the behavior or a mindset, or if it something easily fixed like the knowledge gap. The most common gap is the behavior gap that is seen in organizations who are in dire need for a culture hack. The workforce-culture alignment can lead to getting the best of talent, improve retention and it makes excellent branding for your company.

Outdated processes are another example that result in lethargy in functions. For e.g., if the Finance team does not recognize and respond to the urgency of the need in spite of having all the approvals in place, this slowly becomes the reputation of the function, and very soon the entire organization is talking about 'how a certain Manager in the finance always delays', or, 'how the travel desk is not responsive enough to get back to employees with friendly options, web checkin, etc. Or say, budget barriers, they are very common across organizations, and these barriers can be responsible for huge problems, from the talent pool to output, to company reputation can be a result of the budget problems, sometimes, and there is a culture hacking needed right there.

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Finally, I think a lot rests with the Leadership - your words make a difference, organizations thrive when their leader impact is high. Not only should Leaders espouse the culture, they are also responsible for creating a conducive atmosphere for the employees to follow the culture. Let's take a very simple thing like recognition.

Surprisingly, a report by Gallup said that more than 60% of the work population in America reports they get no recognition in their workplace. Everyone wants to be appreciated for the hard work they do, and it is important that the Leaders to make this culture change. When Leaders feel their functions should not subscribe to an award program as they are part of the support services, yes, these things happen, but the fact is, it leaves an entire team feeling shortchanged.

Culture holds an organization together thru wins and losses. Employees' attitudes, responses and behaviors decide how clients and prospects perceive our business, and it has a direct bearing on the company reputation / brand. “if you can get those two things right — having a clear direction on what you are trying to do and bringing in great people who can execute on the stuff — then you can do pretty well.” – Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook

Hits, Misses and Upgrades from 2018

Rajalakshmi M

2019 marks the 50th anniversary of moon landing. Neil Armstrong became the first human being to land on the moon and quoted the historical lines– ”That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, as roughly six hundred million people watched him on television While, the year 2018 marked the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War; Though it was later overshadowed by the Second World War in terms of the scale of destruction and application of scientific technology in warfare, it was indeed the First Modern War of Science.

These two remarkable incidents are indicators of how humankind as a species are capable in achieving the extremes of light and darkness. Similarly, The Year of the Dog was a year of extreme of sorts.

Artificial Intelligence(AI): The Google Duplex launched in the Google I/O event 2018 event gave a peep into how a machine could have natural-sounding conversations with people to make a restaurant reservation. Though we have been having conversations with the likes of Alexa, Siri, Cortana, this was the first time a task was being done where a human on the other side could be unaware that the communication was with a human like robot. This throws the obvious question- Has a machine passed the famous Turing Test? This goes on to show how much the AI world has progressed with Deep Learning. Deep Learning is not just about throwing more and more training data at the algorithm for better prediction. It is also about selecting the right data, intricate tuning and high degrees of experimentation for good accuracies. In another development Christie's presented the first AI portrait to the world, It was of Edward Belamy created by an AI algorithm, called Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). The piece was expected to fetch $10,000 but it sold for a whopping $432,500. The final art piece was a generation of 15000 portraits. Google's DeepMind worked with Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to explore whether AI could help their clinicians improve the way eye sight threatening conditions are diagnosed and treated, in order to improve patient care. Algorithms have been trained using 1000s of eye scans and then set to detect potential issues. The end result- Doctors could recommend the right course of action in a fraction of the time it would normally take with a higher degree of certainty. The improvement and also in the audio-visual capabilities using Neural Networks can help in sifting through millions of CT Scans and make the life of radiologists better. The coming year will further see results from numerous projects that have been modelling training sets. China with its investments in AI today has touched every sphere that ranges from improving healthcare to understanding productivity in school. The Chinese companies set examples as to how large enterprises have to have a ground infrastructure and processes in place to implement AI.But eyebrows have been raised because of a) the black box phenomenon of AI b) the feeling that biases had crept into algorithms c) Use of Big data for surveillance and screening. It is great when AI helps law enforcers catch the crime doer by processing millions of bytes of visual data easily, but if the same data enables discrimination it could raise issues.

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Though some companies have already taken steps to address the above reservations by having processes that can explain the decision-making process and cleaning up the training data, the coming year will put much pressure to make AI more human friendly and cleaner.

Data Privacy and Security: The year 2018 saw the launch of the EU's historic GDPR that has let businesses and users take control of the data. Couple that with the Cambridge Analytica scandal followed by the high-profile Congressional hearings of Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sheryl Sandberg and Sundar Pichai etc, where various questions asked by the lawmakers touched on the theme of data privacy- it points to the fact in the ever exploding world of data the consumer wants the control of data back. The Internet Giants that have grown on the back of data backed business models are creating doubts in the minds of consumers and lawmakers alike. Though the growth of data based personalized marketing always benefit the businesses and the end customers alike, consumers seem to want more control on what gets used.

In an era where data is money the world is looking at GDPR themed laws to fight data privacy and enhance security. The data companies have a greater responsibility in the coming year to ensure that they keep the trust of the consumer with them by protecting their data.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency: The bitcoin has plunged by 84% as compared to its all time high that was reached in mid-December 2017. In effect any investment made at that point of time will be worth only 1/6th now.

But that does not mean the underlying technology of Blockchain fizzled out. Moving beyond the applications of oft-cited use cases in Financial Industry, Blockchain was adopted by Christie's New York in November that made art world history when it partnered with blockchainsecured registry Artory to record sales. The registry tracks histories, provenance, and archival material and at the same time allows buyers to remain anonymous to increase stakeholder confidence.

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Walmart is working with IBM to enable more than 100 farms that supply Walmart with leafy green vegetables to input detailed information about their food into a blockchain database developed, so that the retailer can keep track of which batch comes from which vendor and take necessary steps in case of any contamination. But a big challenge that awaits Blockchain is that it doesn't fall into the trap technology fatigue when technology gets a hype and doesn't live up to the hype.

Overall the strategies, incidents and happenings of 2018 has been an indication that our march to improve living standards with technology is being pursued with every new age technology. Millions of people without access to Healthcare facilities could get a shot at a faster diagnosis when AI frees up time of the care providers with its capabilities. Meanwhile, among the knowledgeable users where there was an awe over data sharing and availability, there is a sudden oh moment where they wonder who has all the controls? And as a distributed ledger for everything takes shape- 2019 and beyond can only tell if machines with its thinking, storing and executing capacity will have the wherewithal to improve the living standards with minimal damage!

Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/business/wal mart-blockchain-lettuce.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/zoharelhanani/2018/1 2/17/how-blockchain-changed-the-art-world-in2018/#6a8bb9543074 BCG - Mind the (AI) Gap https://deepmind.com/applied/deepmindhealth/working-partners/health-researchtomorrow/moorfields-eye-hospital-nhs-foundationtrust/

Employee Experience Design Loop

When the raison d'etre - #SenseOfPurpose is defined, the variables that impact an employee's experience is an ongoing process. Employee experience design loop is a never ending back and forth interaction between employees and the organization. Each part of the employee's journey with the organisation needs breaking down into loops.

Employee experience refers to an employee's personal perception of the company they work for. This perception is an aggregate of how an employee interprets their various interactions with the company — from business practices to work environment. The holistic measure takes each employee's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about their experience working for the company into consideration.

Once employees become familiar with the process of providing feedback, and sense a change, through an employee experience design loop, it is feasible to constantly gather and analyse responses and suggestions.

This might also include the creation of an internal work group, bringing in members from across the organisation, which meets on a more frequent basis.

Padma Ravichandran

The design loop consists of 4 steps – Respond > Analyze > Design > Launch Respond This is an opportunity provided to employees to give ongoing and real-time feedback. Employees are encouraged to be willing to speak up and share their experiences. Feedback is collected through collaboration tools.

Analyze In this phase, we extract as much insight as possible from the feedback to make the design decision. There is no employee experience without people analytics, which are objective.

Design The next stage is to design or create something based on the feedback and insight.

Launch The actual announcement on the changes, or the initiatives, or the pilot programs across the organization.

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Here is how we embrace a design loop to enhance employee experience at GAVS? We wanted to relook at the Wellness Programs at GAVS, as we believe in bringing your authentic self to work. And to make that happen, we published the existing wellness programs, and asked for inputs on changes they would want to see under #SenseOfPurpose #Wellness.

Respond: Employees were given opportunity to provide feedback on existing program and give inputs on what they would like to be relooked, introduced, or evaluated.

Analyze: From the various feedback tools, we gathered all the inputs, and prioritized the asks. We were able to bucket the quick wins, the low hanging fruits, the nice to haves in this ideation process.

Design: The redesign of the wellness programs was thought through, and launch plans with eective dates were decided.

Launch: The communication on new initiatives under #Wellness program was announced.

We intend to start one loop and close it o; start another loop and close it o.

Here is an insight into the design loop -

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What is the role of an employee?

The employee takes this opportunity to provide genuine and responsible feedback to enhance the programs. It is also an opportunity for him/her to understand initiatives that are long term vs quick wins, and align their expectations based on organizational needs.

What is the role of the organization?

Each part of the employee's journey with the organisation needs breaking down into loops. Each loop should be designed with intent.

Experiences need designing to create a sense of belonging, the belief that each one's voice can be heard, and that they are involved in decision making in their journey mapping.

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Power is gained by sharing knowledge, not hoarding it.”

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