Truly believe India has potential to become data capital of the planet: Microsoft India president

“I truly believe India has the potential to be the data capital of the planet,” said Anant Maheshwari, President Microsoft India at the Business Today India@100 Summit in a Fireside Chat titled Harnessing Technology to Unlock Infinite Possibilities. He said this was for a variety of reasons, most importantly being India’s talent capability. “We are the only country to have more than half a million engineers joining the workforce every year.”

He said the IT services industry was leveraging that power already. He also pointed out that the innovations that were happening in the start-up ecosystem are changing the way data is getting leveraged.  

“Data has now become an asset class. It is no longer something that you just work with, it is also something that you value,” he added.  

“The data that we are generating on the planet in one single year now is equal to all the data that was generated in the human history till about seven years back,” said Maheshwari emphasising the importance of data.

The discussion was joined by Piyush N Singh, Senior Managing Director and India Business Lead Accenture, who on being asked what could make India the next global technology hub said that India’s biggest advantage and challenge was India’s demography. “We have a very capable demography and we're living in a time where pace of change, whether you look at technology, or businesses is running faster than most of the world can cope up with,” he said. We need to skill our workforce to be able to serve a consumer demographic that is digitally native.  

C P Gurnani, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Tech Mahindra added that he believed that twenty five years from now technology and R&D will define how businesses are built out of India. “India’s prowess of building things to scale will come into play,” he said. He added that the two words to remember were ‘vigyaan’ (science) and scale. “As long as we remember that we will be on the right track 25 years from now.”

On being asked if he believed the US recession was going to impact India Gurnani said that he thought everyone was overreacting to the US going into recession. “A slowdown need not be read as recession. Everywhere you go they are hiring. How do you define recession,” he said. “My belief is, the more we integrate with the global trade, the better off we are. And at this stage, I would not be pessimistic.”

Singh added: “A whole lot of the world's economy needs to digitize even faster to serve that hyper demand. So, from that perspective, we find ourselves in a very good place as one of the innovative hubs of the world because we need to drive that rapid digitization of supply chains that will uplift scaling of manufacturing. So, from that perspective, I am less concerned right now.”    

Aayush Ailawadi, Technology Editor and Presenter, Business Today TV who was moderating the discussion asked Singh if there was a need now for the top tech companies around the world and in India to adapt and tweak their older practices to retain and delight younger talent. Singh said that for them Metaverse was a necessity. “During the lockdowns the only way we could provide the brand experience to our people was to bring them into the Metaverse,” said Singh. Accenture inducted close to 100,000 people in the Metaverse. “This was a necessity of giving any brand experience to all our people. Now it will be if I don't give them that experience, they will not associate with me at all. And that will be also the challenge for a whole lot of corporations.” He added: “We are investing quite heavily in that space to be ready to offer the market that experience.”

On being asked about the Indian burgeoning gaming space, Maheshwari said, “Now you combine the time dimension with the physical dimension. That's the Metaverse where you can have your avatar, play asynchronously, and you can play virtually in the real world. So a lot of elements are coming together and that's what is going to define the future of gaming.”

On being asked about ‘moonlighting’, Gurnani said that he did not think it was that rampant. “If he wants to make an extra buck, as long as he's not committing a fraud, and he's not, working against the values and the ethics of the company, I have no problem,” he added.

All three panelists agreed that most employees wanted to come back to office and that to them the social interaction was important. “What we all have missed is the emotion and the empathy. What we have missed is the competitive spirit. What we have missed is that brain spark that happens within the people. I think, personally my assessment, people have predicted 50:50 I think it is going to be more 70 per cent of your time will be spent on the shop floor or on the work,” said Gurnani.