I am extremely grateful to all those who joined us, speakers and guests, last week at Somerset House in London to share their Perspectives on a topic close to our hearts – “Is Automation Truly Transformational?”
Tony Saldanha, Author “Why Digital Transformations Fail” and previously, VP Global Business Services, P&G kicked off the evening with a look at what is truly required for digital transformations to succeed and shared some examples of concrete outcomes he has delivered during his illustrious career in P&G. To deliver 10x benefits, he stressed the need for making technologies, processes and eco-systems come together.
Then, Simon Fairman, Chief Transformation Officer at Cadent Gas brought to light the automation and transformative changes in the gas industry, and the reality of carbon neutral energy companies.
Nigel Watson, Chief Information Officer, Northumbrian Water showed us the power of innovation festivals and ‘sprints’ that bring people from different industries together to solve real business problems in days that would otherwise take months.
Nick Blazquez, ex-President Diageo, Chair Mercy Corps and vyn advisor, brought our attention to how small automations can lead to big transformations. He moved our horizons to markets as far as Africa and Iraq, where technology has transformed payment systems in the distribution channels as well as to beneficiaries receiving aid in war torn locations bringing in transparency, visibility and far reaching changes in different sectors.
Finally, Manu Gupta, Partner at Lakestar, brought the discussion home from the point of view of a venture capitalist, looking back at some of his company’s most successful investments, and challenging us all to judge which startups were transformational.
The evening ended with Kapil Singhal, CEO and Co-Creator, vyn sharing insights from his own personal journey. The use of technology and automation ought to give us more time, but in fact we are finding ourselves even more time-poor, he said. To quote Kapil,
My main takeaway from these diverse perspectives is that yes, automation can lead to acceleration of a process, leading to benefits that make the process simpler, faster, and maybe even cheaper. However, to be truly transformative, automation should create far-reaching changes to customer experiences, reducing time and costs for the user & business, and in the process, create new ways of working.
For the audience, the evening had just begun, opening up the opportunity to share more perspectives. I feel truly privileged to have learnt from the different perspectives in the room! By listening to different stories, from a whole host of people with different experiences across a variety of industries, it gave me a new perspective, not just the single side of a story.
Thank you to all the speakers, customers, partners, colleagues and well-wishers in the room for enriching my learning process.
Perspectives with vyn’ is an annual, informal, cocktails and canapés evening event with short TedX style talks. We bring senior executives & thought leaders from a range of backgrounds together to mingle and inspire each other over evening drinks on current topics.
Would you like to be on our invite list for the next edition of Perspectives? Just drop Mala an email
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