Posted by As the year 2021 wraps in some hours from now, the tech industry leaders in India share their overview of this year and what they foresee in the new year 2022. Despite the second year of COVID-19, the tech sector witnessed a considerable recovery and growth in 2021 as mentioned by many of the tech industry leaders.
Banking on this recovery and growth, tech industry leaders are expecting the momentum to continue moving into the year 2022 backed by technological advancements and innovations. They foresee more demands for technology solutions as the economy will rebound with stronger growth in 2022.
Vishal Agrawal, MD – Avaya India and SAARC
Recovery from Covid-19 has resulted in quick technological advancements and a dramatic transformation of digital experiences over the last several months. As organisations and lifestyles change swiftly, reliance on technology has increased, and radical alternatives have replaced traditional technology. Organisations no longer compete just on the basis of products or services; instead, they compete on the basis of seamless, personalised, connected, and intuitive experiences that are remembered.
Going forward, we will see a greater emphasis on AI, machine learning, and cloud technologies being incorporated into many industries such as healthtech, edutech, fintech, and others, as well as automated contact centres that will further enhance customer experiences. Large firms will also make small infrastructure expenditures as they prepare their organisations for a hybrid workforce by digitally transforming their workforce and developing future workspaces.”
Sushant Gupta, Founder and CEO – SG Analytics
In 2021, the digitisation craze that started with the pandemic in 2020 took on a different frenzy. Everyone needed to go digital yesterday and have established at least a digital baseline. This will continue in 2022 with greater demand from companies across sectors, for solutions and skills necessary to grow their just established digital footprint. In terms of opportunity, there will be new data available and new innovations happening in the e-mobility and manufacturing space.
Kushang Kumar, Co-founder and CEO – SupplyNote
2021 was majorly about the transformation of the restaurant industry with more tech implementations. The pandemic hit the sector real hard, and in order to recover SAS solutions and ghost, kitchen concepts were executed. The much-awaited tech disruption in the food and beverage sector began, and we can easily expect an avalanche of innovations in 2022. The first concept that we believe will catch fire is cloud kitchen, which will have a major impact on the industry.
Neeraj Tyagi, CEO and Co-Founder – We Founder Circle
2021 was majorly the initiator for a couple of investment trends and sectors that will see materialising in 2022. With the huge focus on Ola electric, and the government providing heavy subsidies, there is no doubt that we will see investors pouring in money in the sector. Every company is trying to reap the rural economy for growth, the Agri tech vertical that caught attention in 2021 will soon become finer in terms of operations and become investors’ delight.
Lastly, D2C is offering fast-paced scale-up and acquisition opportunities, which will maintain it among the hottest investment sectors in the new year too. We at WFC, have explored D2C that formed a thick slice of the entire investment pie for us in the first year, and we intend to leverage it more in the coming quarters too,”
Mandar Agashe, Founder and Vice Chairman – Sarvatra Technologies ltd.
Compared to the previous year, the Indian economy had a better phase in 2021, as the pandemic slowed in the second half of the year and the economy reopened. As a result, large banks, small finance banks, as well as cooperative banks witnessed growth in the number of digital transactions done through UPI, AePS, etc. With the help of better banking technology and services, the larger banks in the country, as well as small finance banks and cooperative banks, are serving the customers better.
The government and RBI have played a significant role in creating space for better adaption of digital modes of transactions. Semi-urban and rural India is slowly pacing their way to use more technology-enabled banking facilities. To achieve the dream of a “Digital India”, the focus should be on encouraging more digital transaction methods and infrastructure improvements along with policies that will enable the large and medium players in the sector to be tech-innovators.
The coming year is likely to be fruitful in case the infrastructural challenges are appropriately addressed, easier regulative reforms are introduced and rural India is encouraged to undertake more and more digital transactions with the support of large private sector banks, small finance banks, cooperative banks, NBFCs, and other financial institutions. With various measures undertaken by the government, RBI, and NPCI, the year 2022 is likely to witness accelerated growth in innovation in the digital payments space.
Arvind Jha, SVP – Software Development, Newgen Software
AI/ML-led technologies will take centre stage in 2022. More and more enterprises will accelerate AI/ML adoption as they realise the productivity gains it can bring through intelligent automation. It will also bring about tremendous competitive differentiation by helping enterprises grow by leveraging deep data insights and self-learning models.
We will see larger investments in data engineering platforms, data science departments, and modelling across various business applications. Initial successes are already being reported across Intelligent Process Automation, Intelligent Document Processing, Human Augmentation, Natural Language-based interfaces, and more.
Srividya Kannan, Founder and Director – Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd.
In 2022, enterprise investments in technology will see significant momentum as they return to growth and rebuild their speed in an accelerated manner.
Enterprises will focus on creating contingency plans, including multi-country sourcing strategy, and minimizing disruptions in their sourcing and procurement resulting from geopolitical, economic, or other disturbances. They will invest in critical themes of reducing time to market, accelerated customer engagement while keeping a close eye on costs and efficiencies. They will adopt more direct digital routes to engage with customers while freeing up cash flows. There will be significant transformation projects around cost optimization initiatives to build a resilient future.
Investments in technologies that integrate the physical and virtual worlds will enable superior stakeholder experiences. Hybrid work will be here to stay, and enterprises will invest in digital tools and technologies that will make it easy for employees to work from anywhere while also providing innovation in customer services for several industries such as healthcare, insurance, and hospitality. Enterprises will focus on creating comprehensive experience strategies and resilient architectures that will continuously enhance outcomes by combining AI virtual assistants, mobile applications, and concierge services.
Technologies like Generative AI that generates new digital artifacts from existing sample data sets working on both content or objects will enable superior advancements in R&D across processes.
Operational efficiency will see increased focus. Hyperautomation spending that focuses on governance, compliance, and costs will increase significantly on technologies such as intelligent BPM suites (iBPMS), RPA, low code / no-code development platforms, integration platform as a service (iPaaS) as well as AI/ML, and other types of decision tools. Enterprises will focus on the democratization of IT by creating centers of excellence while also selecting low code and user-friendly business technologies.
Enterprises will also focus on decision intelligence to help them analyze and make better decisions through augmented analytics and AI Decision models. Applications will be composable, based on Packaged Business capabilities that can be assembled in low code environments and cloud-native platforms, allowing enterprises to get a lot more agile. Information security, data protection, and privacy will see heightened investments.