‘Most of our clients are wrestling with what their businesses will be in 5 yrs’
How has the disruption unleashed by business changed and impacted the business landscape for companies like SapientRazorfish? The first thing is that digital is no more on the surface. Digital is moving right into the core of the business, it is moving right up to the CEO (chief executive officer) level.
Most of our clients are now wrestling with what their business is going to be in the next five years. When you have the world’s biggest hotel providers wrestling against Airbnb, which does not even hold any rooms. It’s just technology in the hands of the people creating hotel solutions. So, the technology driving to the core is now changing all aspects of the business. It is also changing our business.
So what was once for us a familiar case of working with just media and marketing firms has now turned into re-architecting the business from product to service to bank branch to distribution through web and mobile. developing new skill sets in areas such as product design. For example, talking about product design, for long we have been used to thinking about mobile app design for say a bank. Now we are thinking differently. One may be thinking about a mobile app from the outset but whatever you develop today has to be a brand new theme and product that could help save a bank from extinction amidst rising competition from various payments apps.
Such solutions call for a different mindset around innovation and creativity. Digital product design is a priority for us. We are also big on service design as a practice that is thinking about how do we transform the entire customer journey inside the business and outside the business. The focus is on delivering cognitive experience through artificial intelligence — think of Siri. A lot of our clients are looking at how do we harness the power of big data to create some level of automated smart experiences. There are many among us that think the future of the website is really cloudy at a time when we are talking about using an app to book our flights. Essentially, it’s a fight between search versus browse as we are realising that there are different ways of interaction.
A lot of our clients are looking at how do we harness the power of big data to create smart experiences