One of India’s most successful young entrepreneurs and amongst its foremost digital experts, Dilip Kumar Modi is the Chairman and Group CEO of DiGiSPICE Technologies and Founder of Spice Money as well as Korero Platforms. Dilip is a second-generation entrepreneur who has pioneered several new innovations and built a strong portfolio of businesses during his stellar career spanning over two decades. He has a penchant for nurturing businesses and seeing them grow under DiGiSPICE group, led by him.
The business challenges for the past year and a half have given rise to the need for businesses to not only be future-ready with technologies, but also to become agile and resilient intelligent enterprises for a competitive edge. The pandemic urged many businesses to reassess their strategy and concept of resilience as they faced multidimensional challenges. This brought about the rise of intelligent enterprises.
An Intelligent Enterprise is a company leveraging modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Cloud, and Internet of Things (IoT), to efficiently use data to generate real-time relevant insights about the customers, business operations and competition and market environment. Many industries are already well on their way to becoming intelligent enterprises, but the media and entertainment industry has been slow to catch up.
Need for Intelligent Enterprises
The need to transform into intelligent enterprises also holds true for the companies in the media and entertainment industry. Before the pandemic, the media and entertainment industry was struggling to keep up with the increasing demands of the consumers, leading to the OPEX of the companies rising faster than their revenue, that is, their spending was rising faster than their profit — definitely not an ideal situation. A study by Ernst & Young in January 2020 found that media and entertainment executives understand the need to reinvent their business and a third of the executives surveyed said that their companies will cease to exist if the traditional business models are not phased out.
With the onset of the pandemic, the media and entertainment industry changed drastically, with the degree of the impact varying between different segments. Inherently digital segments such as over-the-top (OTT) video, online gaming and television witnessed a rise in consumption, while other segments such as live events and movie theatres suffered in a socially distanced world. The shift towards digital in consumers’ behaviour was accelerated, pushing the need for digital disruption in the industry forward by several years. Work from home introduced new challenges for business operations but it also nudged organisations to open up to new avenues and possibilities in order to support growth and scale profitably.
In the current environment, transformation to intelligent enterprises in the media and entertainment industry will ensure that the companies are able to withstand any unexpected hurdles and survive long-term structural changes with the help of insights unearthed from the extensive data.
Intelligent Enterprise for the Future Consumer Sentiment
The behavioural change seen during the pandemic towards everything virtual is expected to stick even after the pandemic as virtual has turned into a habit for many. This would mean out-of-home (OOH) entertainment, like live events and professional sports, will continue to face challenges. Here, integrating the technological principles of intelligent enterprise, the companies need to evolve their delivery model to meet the consumer where they are – in their homes – and devise ways to engage the fans through experiential virtual live events.
OTT platforms that saw an uptick will gain a competitive edge with original, targeted content. This is especially critical for television. The integration of new-age technologies will allow the companies to determine future trends among their consumers to build strong content banks. Media and entertainment intelligent enterprises will stand out as they will be able to minutely understand their audience segments, personalise the media experience and build strong relationships. These relationships will help in increasing revenue and forming more niche audience segments for accurate cross-selling and up-selling targeting.
Intelligent Enterprise for the Future Organisation
Remote working brought about a major shift in the expectations and behaviour of the workforce. While organisations struggled to adapt with the changes, the importance of building a culture of agility became increasingly apparent. The media and entertainment industry will emerge out of the pandemic to a transformed work environment where intelligent enterprises will need to employ cloud and remote working solutions and upskill employees to meet the new challenges.
The demand for original content will shift the focus to building content banks and strengthening content pipeline, which means intelligent enterprises will need to leverage technological tools such as AI, ML and cloud to reduce lead times and foster seamless remote collaborations.
Simplifying the enterprise and integrating automation can also help in building intelligent enterprises. Simplification can lead to streamlined decision-making and lower costs as it will empower executives to quickly pivot and redeploy resources to areas (such as talent, technology, content, IP) that will give the company a competitive edge. It can also lead to siloed business units consolidating to build more integrated market strategies.
Automation can eliminate the need for executives to be involved in time-consuming and low-value, but necessary, corporate activities of accounting, legal, finance and others. This will allow the executives to be focused entirely on driving meaningful growth strategies.
Need of the hour
A survey by Ernst & Young in April 2021 found that building more resilient enterprises post-pandemic was a priority for media and entertainment executives across industry subsectors. 52% of the executives said that the pandemic changed how their businesses operate permanently. Most organisations found themselves re-examining their business models to align with this realisation.
The approach to becoming an intelligent enterprise will vary across different subsectors due to differing priorities, business models, revenue streams and relative maturity. Television production companies will more likely focus on reinventing their execution and delivery strategies and attempt to go hybrid in order to compete with the OTT players, while advertising and marketing enterprises will strategise ways to better leverage the volumes of available data for greater ROI measurement and transparency. Intelligent enterprises are the need of the hour as they will enable business to face any future major changes efficiently with minimal disturbance and build strong customer and executive relationships as a foundation for resilient, agile and adaptable businesses.