Digital technology now core to resilience, business continuity: Satya Nadella

New Delhi, Jan 28: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday said the pace of adoption of digital technology has grown significantly amid the pandemic and has now become core to both resilience and business continuity efforts of enterprises. Speaking at a TiEcon Delhi-NCR event, Nadella said digital technology is also bringing in the next level of productivity gains and driving efficiencies across industries.

"This pandemic has fundamentally accelerated what I thought was going to be a decade-long process of digital transformation...we've seen tremendous structural change... "...digital technology is becoming core to both how we think about resilience and business continuity, as well as bringing about that next level of productivity change and gain and efficiencies across industries," he added.

He cited examples of industries like retail, healthcare and manufacturing that have leveraged digital technology to reach customers amid the pandemic that forced people to maintain social distancing. Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy highlighted how the lockdown in early 2020 drove significant changes in consumer behaviour, which in turn, changed the course of many businesses.

"The pandemic also drove a change in the way people interacted with technology. In India, many first-time users for instance, got online, sought entertainment, made purchases and explored fintech offerings -- all in a way bridging a digital gap that may have taken years to close," he added.

Krishnamurthy pointed out that the Walmart-owned company focused on accelerating innovation to meet the increasing needs of consumers through multilingual interfaces, digital payments, voice-enabled search and other solutions.

"While addressing consumer needs, we also used technology to help businesses and MSMEs by providing critical data insights, helping them pivot their businesses to stay relevant.

"Overall, e-commerce helped keep consumption, manufacturing and distribution alive by preventing the economy from shutting down completely and all of this was possible only through technology," he added.