Abhinav Kumar

Abhinav Kumar has been CMO of Tata Consultancy Services for 19 years. For 15 consecutive years now TCS is partnering the World Economic Forum at Davos, something which has grown into a pretty important partnership for TCS. Abhinav: ‘It's a great opportunity to meet and connect with a lot of our clients and partners. And also to gauge of the sentiment of world leaders from the world of business, from government, from academy and media, and what is everyone thinking about how the year is gonna come across.’

‘One of the things we’ve taken away from it this year is that people do expect challenges. There's significant challenges in the world today, economically as well. But a lot of people also expect the economic downturn is gonna be soft and creates also a lot of opportunities. One of which is on the technology.’

‘If you look at the 400 sessions which took place this year, I would say most of them had some element of technology involved in it. Technology has become such an intrinsic part of every debate.’

Technology as the solution to all our problems? Abhinav: ‘Technology can solve a lot of problems if applied in the right way, it's regulated well, we develop it towards the right purposes. But it has its own risks and downsides, which we need to be aware of. For example, on the media side, the challenge of misinformation, fake news and what it does to societies.’

What about the downside of AI? ‘Do you know the demographic which is the most positive about ChatGPT? It's teenagers. Mainly because of homework. But so often technology when it creates a challenge or a problem, you can use technology as well to solve that problem.’

Where's IoT playing a role in that?
‘IoT looks very complex to people, but in simplicity, all it means is that you have these sensors on different machines, and through that we are able to collect data and take more intelligent decisions. An example from the Netherlands is Diamond Shipyards, a very long-standing and prestigious business. One of the things we've helped them do is implement an IoT platform by which a ship has about 5,000 sensors on it. For preventive maintenance for example. Now they're able to advise their own clients on how they can use a better optimization of their routes or how to repair the boat when it needs to be repaired. More efficient and using less energy or burning less fossil fuel.’

Abhinav, please comment on the following statement:

Real growth through technological innovation can only happen when everyone participates.
‘Yes. I believe technology should be inclusive and I think one of the challenges is that we gotta break through the digital divide. One of the biggest challenges for this industry is the shortage of talent. Today there are about 6 million open jobs across the technology industry globally. And the reason they’re open is because either, in the education system, there aren't enough students who've chosen STEM career. Or the exact skills which are needed. There aren't enough people trained in it. And some areas are going really fast, like cybersecurity or IoT. You're talking about data scientists, artificial intelligence scientists. I think that's an opportunity for our inclusion problem. What technology and the internet have done is making people digitally literate. We have a lot of programs, of course in India but also here in Europe, in the United States and other places. Many of our engineers volunteer at schools, teach children about robotics and excite them about careers in this field, but also help teachers. I think one of the key things in helping educate the next generation about technology is to give teachers the tool to help them do so.’

How do marathons relate to your brand? How does that strengthen your brand?
‘So marathons do many interesting things for us. We got into marathons, not because of a brand, but for a very different reason. We look at it from the point of view of the health and wellness of our workforce and our clients. One of the challenges of being a typical software engineer, is that you're spending most of your day punching a laptop. Creating great innovations is not great for your health. We had some programs to improve wellness inside. Our CEO at that time took up running as well and we encouraged people to do that. But I think the benefit it has done for us from a brand point of view, it really takes a brand down at a city level. Into business hubs where a large part of our client- and our employee base is.’

‘The sheer visibility the brand gets: one of the challenges of being in a B2B services business is that our product is invisible. These marathons change that. and we bring a lot of technology to these events.’