Ambeshwar Nath: building capabilities in AI and the cloud
Can you tell us about your role and responsibilities?
I am a Senior Vice President heading Infosys’ Consumer Goods, Retail and Logistics business unit in EMEA. As a keen technologist and digital strategist, I work with clients as a trusted advisor as they execute complex business and digital transformations to help them build a competitive advantage.
What is your point of difference as a business?
Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting with 315,000 employees globally. We help senior business leaders transform their value chain through the latest process innovations and digital capabilities. We deliver practical, strategy-driven value that optimises and delivers business outcomes for our clients.
What technology are you most looking forward to using more of?
I am excited at leveraging technologies to bring experience, technology and data together. For example, artificial intelligence will enable our clients to be more responsive, adaptive, and agile to the changes happening around them. I am also excited to see how the metaverse will evolve and help drive physical experiences in the digital world.
What has been your highlight in your current role?
Delivering outcomes that positively impact my clients everyday is what I enjoy most in my current role. It’s humbling when our clients place their trust in Infosys and expect our teams to shape solutions that can help them transform and strive to succeed in the new world of tomorrow.
What exciting plans do you have coming up as an organisation?
We will continue to build our capabilities in AI, digital and cloud as these are key areas we want to grow and differentiate. Cloud is growing at a phenomenal pace and we will continue to work with a range of companies to improve cloud capabilities across multiple industries. We also recently launched Infosys Metaverse Foundry, a service to accelerate enterprises’ ability to evolve and execute metaverse strategies.
There is a lot more going on in Infosys – so stay tuned!
How can the metaverse be a positive opportunity for brands/retailers?
The metaverse will change retail forever. It creates an opportunity for brands and retailers to create an immersive, virtual, and persistent environment for their customers, whilst also offering new ways for brands and retailers to market their products and target new audiences. By creating an interactive and personalised experience for this target audience, brands have been able to tap into a new pool of consumers without disenchanting their traditional audience who may prefer to engage with the brand in brick-and-mortar stores.
How can the metaverse be seen as a social network capability?
The metaverse will not simply replace the modern technology that exists today, but will instead compliment popular platforms such as Instagram, Tik Tok or Facebook, by introducing new and immersive social experiences. The pandemic transformed the way we communicate with our families and friends, opening up new opportunities to engage and communicate with others beyond the traditional – and somewhat restrictive – forms of instant messaging and video communication. In the metaverse, families can hug and express themselves in ways they haven’t been able to on social media before.
What can businesses do to implement a Metaverse strategy?
To harness the metaverse to its full potential, here are my top tips to think about when implementing a successful metaverse strategy:
- Think about what experience you want to emulate for your customers in the metaverse – how do you want them to feel in this space you’ve created for them?
- If you’re seeking to deliver a personalised customer experience, what products do you want to introduce in this space and how would you like customers to engage with them?
- What is it about your brand that generates customer loyalty? How could this be transferred to the metaverse?
If businesses don’t consider these key questions, we’ll likely see a growing trend across the market where businesses are implementing metaverse technologies without meeting their customers’ needs.
What are the challenges surrounding the metaverse for retailers and do they have the correct technology in place to join the virtual world?
The metaverse is still in its experimentation stage, and there’s no question that there are still many risks for brands who wish to join without first considering their metaverse strategy. I think the key challenge for businesses is that many aspects of the metaverse remain disconnected. For example, avatars are unable to take their assets from one metaverse platform to another. However, if the metaverse were to become interconnected, avatars could transfer assets from one platform to another for purposes such as trading, gaming, or online shopping.
Overall, the metaverse presents an exciting opportunity. As it continues to grow in popularity, these technicalities will in no doubt be developed and improved.