The potential to leverage technology is the “single largest opportunity for India” with a few sectors such as the financial, education and healthcare services already taking the lead in digital transformation, said Noshir Kaka, senior partner at McKinsey and Co., Mumbai, during his keynote at the Mint Digitalist Forum 2017 by SAP in Mumbai.
According to Kaka, who also co-leads the consulting firm’s global analytics practice, about 20-30% of India’s incremental gross domestic product is expected to be enabled by technology in the next 10-15 years. He added that the technology spend by companies is increasing each year and taking up a significant portion of their balance sheets.
“The financial services sector is clearly at the front end (of digital transformation). We are seeing it every single day,” Kaka said. There is massive opportunity in education and skilling and that much of the innovation happening in the world today is in “adult learning using technology”, he added. Citing the example of the Narayana Hrudayalaya hospital, Kaka pointed out that technology is being used in the healthcare segment to empower nurses and clinical professionals to perform with better efficiencies in a short span of time. He added that agriculture is another sector where a lot of innovation is happening. For instance, according to Kaka, it is possible to predict the yield with a “reasonable degree of accuracy” within six weeks of planting a crop. “Imagine what it can do for crop insurance, banks and farmers!” he exclaimed.
However, according to Kaka, due to the lack of awareness about the potential of technology and data, the pace of digital transformation in most companies in India is not as fast as it needs to be. “We are able to solve problems in manufacturing that were 15-20 years old, and which nobody could solve. We are able to design products which no one thought we were able to design. We are able to fix things before they actually break. We are able to predict outcomes and problems before they are actually known,” he said, underscoring the potential of analytics.
Kaka acknowledged that jobs were being disrupted by the digital tsunami. According to him, 45% of all known tasks that constitute a job in the world today can be automated. However, he added that though traditional jobs will “get shrunk”, new opportunities and new demands will keep coming up.
Compiled by Isha Trivedi, Bidya Sapam and Sahib Sharma.