Pulkit Ahuja, CEO & Founder, Proxgy

Pulkit Ahuja is the founder of Proxgy, author of 2 books, former founder of 3 startups, inventor of multiple patented technologies, processes and designs, ideator of several brands and angel investor in a couple of companies. Pulkit Ahuja is a serial entrepreneur, author and inventor. He is experienced in founding and successfully running disruptive technology startups in mobility, transportation, ad-tech and education domains. Companies Pulkit has founded include Proxgy, Cabsguru, Unlockar, Yeshlé, RollingSlate, SchoolCampus Tech among others. He is the author of Bestselling financial fiction ‘Googled by God’. Pulkit co-authored his first book ‘Risk Management in Basel’ while pursuing his MBA. Apart from books, Pulkit has also authored several scholarly papers in the fields of finance and technology (neural networks, price movements, etc.) which have been published and cited by several National and International publications.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic struck India in such an unprecedented manner that it threw everyone, including the government, in complete disarray. Companies across the industrial sector were forced to adopt disruptive technologies like the Cloud, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, to name a few. Despite the various challenges the work-from-home (WFH) operations model presented, like vulnerabilities in security, employee misconduct, and general misplacement of the workforce, companies had no other choice but to adopt the technologies that would enable them to transition to their virtual space. This paved the way for the aggressive adoption of digitization.

This has kickstarted a new industrial revolution that has catalysed business processes to become more efficient, cost-effective, and driven towards progress and longevity. Digitization has enabled companies to address the ever-burgeoning demands of consumers. Undoubtedly, the best way to meet them was through automation. In a short while, automation has been aggressively adopted by Indian companies, primarily because of the benefits it provides like better CRM, optimizations in redundant workflows and efficient use of resources, to name a few. With the increase in the number of vaccinated people, the country is slowly reopening. With things going back to normal, should companies still rely and transition towards more automation? The answer is YES!

The Need for India to Move Towards Automation

The Need for Increased Virtual Assistance: While the number of vaccinated cases has increased, COVID-19 is still an actual threat. So, going entirely back to the way things used to be is still not advised. Virtual assistance is a safer and efficient choice. More importantly, after more than a year, people have begun adjusting to the reality that the pandemic has severely altered. Companies should employ the same virtual assistance they offered their consumers during the pandemic. The highest advantage of digitization and later automation was that it reduced the workload and increased accessibility. It caters to a level of comfort that people are used to now, and a complete overhaul once again would hurt businesses more than any benefit it would provide.

Increased Personalization: With companies relying more on the digital space than the physical one, technologies like cloud and data have become important support pillars. Companies have figured out that the best way to cater to their customer demands is by understanding consumer analytics, targeting the right audience, providing accessibility and a virtual IRL experience that provides the customers with more autonomy and preference than any conventional physical environment. They are provided greater assistance through AI-powered bots on product websites than an inexperienced customer representative. User experience can be tailored and made customer-specific. It saves time and resources for all pirates involved in the business. In short, going virtual provides a more enhanced and satisfactory user experience.

Increased Industrial Optimization and Output: Automation is done primarily to ensure redundancies are reduced, operations are executed with perfection, and the burden placed on manpower is significantly reduced. Consider a manufacturing industry before automation was introduced. It would require a lot of workforce and skilled training to ensure that the assembly, packaging, and inspection are done precisely. But with automation, all of the grunt and minimal skilled tasks can be automated, and the workforce can be directed towards more meaningful employment. Automation increases efficiency, scalability, and sustainability by cutting down wastage and increasing overall revenue.

Sustaining Technological Advancement: Automation is the future. The pandemic was devastating in more aspects than one, but it cannot be ignored that the pandemic acted as the perfect catalyst that induced companies and consumers to adopt disruptive technologies more readily than they would have in conventional times. Necessity is truly the mother of all innovation, and the pandemic created an insatiable and unprecedented need that could only be met with automation and other disruptive technologies. It allowed people to more readily and promptly take the next natural step in the industrial revolution a lot sooner than intended. Robotics, automation, VR, AR, and other digital platforms became true live savers and introduced people to a new manner in which technology can be leveraged to create a more positive impact. India has to adapt and stay true to its course in aggressively adopting automation if the Indian market is to sustain the pandemic and any such circumstances in the future.

It was perhaps Dr. Giovanni Traverso, Business Transformation & Management Consultant, who best captured the aggressive rate at which automation is being adopted in India in recent times. He had this to say while scouting India for its electronic components’ market at the behest of Bitron, “In my job, I frequently visit Indian manufacturers of electronic components and have seen many deployments of automation excellence in-process monitoring, output control, and ERP integration. Over the last 3 years, I noted an increase of such champions.”

The recent years and especially the second wave of the pandemic have been a much-needed wake-up call for Indian companies to realize that their model and current business continuity plan will not sustain their revenue or overall business. The need to adopt disruptive technologies has gone from a future possibility to a present mandate. With prominent companies like Proxgy providing a safe virtual platform for everything, including entertainment, shopping, education, and healthcare, now is the perfect time for companies to make the switch to automation primarily because it ensures sustainability against almost any difficult circumstance in the physical world.

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