Axis Bank is a year and half into a multi-year technology transformation programme driven in large part by intelligent automation. The bank, India's third largest in the private sector by total assets, has adopted agile methodology with multiple cross-functional squads working on over 220 high-priority, organization-wide transformation projects. As of March 2021, more than 100 projects were fully completed, and they have delivered promising outcomes in the form of reduced turnaround times, improved productivity, and better customer experience. For example, the corporate banking business has been able to cut the loan approval time to around a quarter of what it used to be, even as the productivity of relationship managers has more than doubled. The bank invested in modernizing the core systems, scaling up the cloud portfolio for supporting the real-time business models, and building resilience across its operations.

Digital Transformation quickly became one of the most popular buzzwords of the COVID era as leaders struggled to navigate the applications, virtualized experiences, and new practices required to enable and manage a remote workforce fully. Yet, even as many organizations have returned to on-site or hybrid operations, the need for leaders to define, execute, and balance how a business adapts to the faster pace of today's digital reality has never been more critical. At its simplest, Jean-Luc Robert, CEO of Kyriba, sees digital transformation as a catalyst to achieving accelerated business growth with a modern application of talent, smart processes, and actionable data. With hyper-connected solutions enabled by composable, AI-driven technology that unifies data from across the enterprise, modern business leaders can stay ahead of the competition and drive strategy with precision and confidence. Regardless of who within the C-Suite is driving change, to make digital transformation successful, ... [ ] executives and their teams must leverage finance as a critical partner to deliver.

Digital Transformation quickly became one of the most popular buzzwords of the COVID era as leaders struggled to navigate the applications, virtualized experiences and new practices required to fully enable and manage a remote workforce. Yet, even as many organizations have returned to on-site or hybrid operations, the need for defining, executing, and leveling how a business adapts to today's digital reality has never been more important. Jean - Luc Robert, CEO of Kyriba, sees digital transformation to achieving new business outcomes ... [ ] with a new combination of people, processes, and data At its simplest, Jean - Luc Robert, CEO of Kyriba, sees digital transformation to achieving new business outcomes with a new combination of people, processes, and data. As the CEO of a leading cloud-based finance and IT solution company, Jean -Luc values transformation projects that move the company forward with a compelling ROI, enabled by hyper-automation and composable technology that unlock a holistic view of data from across the enterprise to drive strategy with precision and confidence. The CEO leads the company to achieve a more competitive and profitable future state and is supported by visionary executives who collectively enable various parts of the CEO's plan.

The COVID-19 crisis forced businesses everywhere to fast track their digital transformation efforts. Faced with the stark choice of becoming a digital-first business, or having no business at all, companies that were previously behind the curve had to implement everything from remote working to entire digital storefronts in a matter of days. According to research by McKinsey, the digital initiatives unleashed in response to the pandemic leapfrogged seven years of progress in a matter of months as companies acted 20 to 25 times faster than they had believed was possible. In the process, this acceleration of digital during the crisis brought about a sea change in executive mindsets with regard to the role of technology in business. Fast forward to today, and corporate leaders are now investing in technology for competitive advantage, refocusing their entire business around cutting-edge technologies, and initiating a business culture where experimentation and innovation is actively encouraged.

Digital transformation is a global business phenomenon, capturing the attention of enterprises in every industry and spurring major investment. In survey after survey, heads of companies cite digital transformation as their No. 1 concern. By 2023, the digital transformation market is expected to reach $6.8 trillion, according to research firm IDC, and 75% of organizations will have a comprehensive digital transformation roadmap in place -- up from 27% of companies today. The term digital transformation is broadly defined as the use of computer-based technologies to improve an organization's performance. Dismissed as just a buzzword for many years, digital transformation has become palpable and urgent: Of the companies surveyed in the most recent Digital Vortex study, 88% said digital disruption will have a major impact on their industries; 41% of those respondents said disruption was imminent. The question might be asked, what took so long?

Having been privileged to witness the evolution of the data science and artificial intelligence (AI) scene in the Middle East for the past 10 years and having spoken at one of the first big data events in Dubai back in 2013, it is clear to me that there are considerable opportunities for AI in this vibrant region. Recently, I got the chance to present on the top 10 AI challenges of companies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, at Virtual Executive Boardroom: Key Insights on Becoming a Data-Driven Enterprise, which took place at DigiConnect (UAE) and was delivered to top C-level executives and senior data managers from the most relevant companies in the GCC region. In this post, I will not get into each of these ten challenges. However, I will focus on a common issue that came up as a top priority for them in a quick live poll during the session: The issue of trusting decisions made by AI. Interpreting deep learning networks takes place in a tough playground, so making AI interpretable serves one specific goal, and that is to trust the decisions made by AI models.

There may have been a time when an organization's automation strategy was defined primarily by siloed, ad hoc, and task-based workflows. Now, however, the most effective and impactful initiatives require business leaders to ask bigger, more challenging questions beyond simply what tasks can be automated and the ROI on cost reduction. Here is how to question everything you know about your business processes. Successful digital transformation in today's landscape necessitates leaders having a better picture of how things are working interconnectedly and how users are truly operating within the process boundaries to be enhanced and improved universally to improve customer outcomes. True digital transformation does not simply digitize analog processes.

The bar for what counts as artificial intelligence is continually rising. Technologies should lose their AI status when they become routine (optical character recognition is no longer recognized as an example of AI for this reason). However, for marketers it's tempting to go in the opposite direction and rebrand all kinds of routine technologies as AI in order to make them sound more exciting and newsworthy. AI was a key theme at this year's Mobile World Congress. One AI-themed announcement was "aia", from telecoms IT giant Amdocs, which claims to enable the "self-driving telco".