How can tech solve business challenges? Panelists deliberate

In today’s transformative business era, emerging technologies play a decisive role in helping organisations scale on demand, improving resilience, and minimising infrastructure investments. Bridging the gap between problem solving and decision making, technology has taken the communication between the client and business to the next level.

In a panel discussion themed ‘Solving biz with tech: the solution game’ at the recently held TechSparks 2022, speakers deliberated on the potential of technology to become a game changer.

“It's important that you invest in the right technology,” reasoned Sridhar Perumal, Regional Lead - SMB Business, Salesforce. “You are going to be future-proofed with the kind of investments that you're making. In that sense, it becomes very important that you put your money in the right place,” he said.

Sridhar cited examples of how new industries have emerged by adopting technology – companies delivering groceries through technology, online retail lending and online doctor consultations, thus breaking the traditional means of doing business with the help of technology. New-age tech adopters, he said, are catapulting growth or taking over a fair share of the market.

Shedding light on how Instoried is leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to add empathy to its content, Sharmin Ali, Founder and CEO, Instoried said, “We partnered with about 50,000+ well-known influencers/content writers/content marketers analysts globally to understand what they thought is an absolute imperative point in their content writing journey that could help brands create great content. Based on their interviews, we realised that the challenge is not about generating content but creating content that resonates well with the audience and leaves an impact upon their minds.”

In order to stay relevant and to create content that really matters, Sharmin discovered that there needs to be an empathy element in the content. “And that's exactly what we did. So, how do you spruce up your content game? First, we generate content using AI, of course, and then analyse the empathy quotient of the content. And you don't just stop there, you take it a notch further by making it even more engaging by getting smart recommendations from your content in order to ensure that it is sticking in your audience's minds,” she explained.

Dealing with security concerns and piracy

While new-age technologies come with their share of benefits, they are also fraught with risks. Jayesh Gadewar, Co-founder, Scrut.io pointed out, “More and more companies are going cloud-native; your infrastructure is remote and your employees are also working remotely, risks can come from anywhere. So, having good security practices and security controls is very important. That’s where we essentially help customers, who are trying to measure their risk and are figuring out where their risk lies across their organisation, and trying to help them mitigate them.”

Shifting focus from technological risks to piracy concerns, Siddhant Jain, CEO, VdoCipher Media Solutions spoke about how their solution aims to resolve the issue of piracy. When a person illegally downloads or screen captures a video, it causes a revenue loss to the content creator. When Siddhant and his team decided to address this concern, they realised that the available technology to fight piracy were in the reach of only big players like Netflix and Amazon Prime. “So, we brought the highest level of security in the form of encryption and user base watermarking with the ease of integration so that businesses of any size or kind can use it,” said Siddhant.

“Usually, when startups start building a product, they may be similar to an existing product. For example, you can build the same feature set, but if you build it with much better ease of use, or better ease of integration, then it can work out in your favour, and you can still get a fair share of the market,” he pointed out.

Can AI take over jobs?

Busting some myths around how AI can take over jobs, Sharmin said, “I don't really think AI can completely take over; a human element will always be there. One of the biggest threats that my customers feel is that my product is going to completely render a copywriter obsolete. I don't think that is going to happen. Ultimately, it's all about the data that you feed into the system, which eventually processes and then gives you the output.”

Concluding the discussion, Sridhar stated that it is very important for organisations to identify the demographic of their customers and understand how to engage with them. “Earlier, we used to go to banks to withdraw money, today, we have ATMs. Earlier, we used to talk to an agent. Today, we don't want to even talk to an agent. These are small nuances, but companies adapting to these changes are the ones that are seeing hyper scale hyper growth and experiencing customer satisfaction,” he said.