How Nagarro is accelerating their customers’ business transformation by harnessing the power of data

With over 16,000 employees in 30 countries, Nagarro is a leading player in the digital engineering space. The company has witnessed incredible growth over the last decade and has been able to create a niche for itself in helping customers become digital-first companies. CXOToday got in touch with Anurag Sahay, Managing Director and Global Head – AI and Data Science at Nagarro, to learn more about the company’s AI growth, improving business efficiency, and what the future holds for the industry.

Q1) In today’s time, data is everything. How according to you can companies harness the power of data to scale businesses?

Response: There is no doubt that data in today’s time holds utmost importance, but I believe that companies should focus on creating business value instead. The way businesses were driving this earlier wasn’t based as much on evidence but on experiences, knowledge, and learnings people brought into the organization. Nowadays, businesses don’t want to depend on theoretical frameworks anymore but more on evidence. Therefore, the big value proposition is business value.

Organizations are harnessing the power of data to scale their business value. They start by looking at behavior patterns such as – how people are, how their customers are, how their employees are, and so on. Data showcases real-time interactions and represents numerous patterns of behavior and information. Organizations leverage these patterns to understand how they can further improve and bring forth their competitive edge. There are certain ways how this can be done. The first way is through analytics, which helps create a multitude of real-time business value. It is essentially an insight – because the information flow is quick and quantitative.

The second way is through Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which helps data to become scalable and build better and more complex analytics efficiently. Leveraging AI and Data Science, machines instead of humans can easily crunch data on patterns of behavior and information. For example, instead of hiring 200 data scientists, business leaders can build a well-oiled analytics system by hiring five machine learning engineers who will train machines to mine information.

Thus, the central value proposition is business value and analytics, and that’s what organizations should be targeting.

Q2) How can artificial intelligence be leveraged for analytics and forecasting to improve business efficiency?

Response: While organizations should leverage AI and other advanced technologies, it is imperative to keep in mind the key analytics critical for their business value proposition, the key KPIs to monitor, and so forth. They should then look at the most important scaling problems they are facing, introduce and implement AI to them, and use algorithms to bind these insights automatically. This will bring the same insights to the organizations at a cheaper cost. Sometimes, it can even bring better insights than what humans can bring, all while making fewer errors.

Q3) Why is API Management important? And how can companies better devise an API management strategy?

Response: API Management is now being approached by organizations as a critical strategy. It is all about managing and sensibly defining interfaces and standardizing them across all departments and functions. As interfaces are designed and structured, analytics must be built around them. Once completed, the information can be utilized in a very standard manner across the enterprise. This is where API management platforms come in, which can help make the process more seamless and efficient. Organizations must follow this properly because if they don’t modularize their functions and make them very specific and interface-oriented, they might lose out on being able to scale sensitively.

Q4) What is hyper automation and how is Nagarro utilizing this technology?

Response: Hyperautomation is a business-driven approach that organizations widely utilize to identify and automate complex tasks and processes that usually depend on human inputs and knowledge. It involves the systematic use of cognitive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Machine Vision (MV), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech Processing, Signal and Sensor Data Processing, etc., which enables streamlining business and IT processes, thereby bringing scale and speed to workflows. Hyperautomation as a process is preceded by digitalization and automation.

We at Nagarro help our clients automate their journeys in numerous ways. We use AI technologies to build hyperautomation platforms for our customers, which result in vast cost savings and error improvements. We are applying them in manufacturing, real estate defect assessment, insurance sector, and medical diagnostics, amongst others, and hence, several domains are implementing and reaping the benefits of hyperautomation.

Q5) How are Nagarro’s AI and Data Science capabilities helping customers accelerate their business growth?

Response: We look at it from a broad perspective. We believe that businesses can thrive by implementing AI and Data Science in 3 ways – they can stimulate business growth, increase efficiency, and reduce risk. All three are very important aspects for a business to take on.

When it comes to business growth, the key idea for some of our clients is to build more customers. We adopt a customer-centric approach that enables our clients to onboard more customers on their platforms and ensures a seamless experience. We leverage AI and analytics to help organizations improve their marketing and sales, better understand the customer, and measure customer experiences.

Enhanced supply chain management is another integral factor in how businesses can grow efficiently. We at Nagarro stimulate business growth for our clients and look at smarter supply chain analytics. We emphasize what is being created, the areas that are not working efficiently, and where the errors are happening. Trying to make the supply chain much more responsive is the way to do that. These are just some of the ways we are helping our customers leverage business.

Q6) What do you think is the future of the Metaverse in the IT industry and what are Nagarro’s plans in this space?

Response: The way I look at the Metaverse is that it’s the evolution of the Internet. If you think about the Internet from a physical view, it’s all about switches and fibers. From an experiential perspective, it is made up of web browsers, email, collaborative software, applications like MS Teams and Slack, etc.

The Metaverse is taking the Internet with a 3D context or virtual context, where reality is going to be slightly hazier and less separable like VR, which leads to more immersive experiences. Metaverse uses technologies like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), AI algorithms, and an understanding of the human cognitive to create a more immersive experience. The Internet becoming more immersive for us was bound to happen, and that’s the direction we are heading.

Nagarro is heavily invested in all innovative and emerging technologies. We have cutting-edge tools when it comes to analytics, data science, AI etc., and we are also taking our first steps towards establishing a metaverse practice. In fact, we recently acquired RipeConcepts, a company in this space that delivers high-quality, multi-channel creative content at a scale and excels in the creative digital disciplines of design, illustration, 3D modeling, animation, and marketing. Additionally, we are training our colleagues through several learning platforms to become better acquainted with what Metaverse means and how it can be leveraged. We aim to become a big influencer in this space, along with the clients that we are working with. I think this is going to be an interesting field, and we will do a lot more in the coming years.