On the road to digital transformation — Mahindra Group plans on getting 75 per cent of its workload on the cloud in the next two to three years. In an exclusive interaction with businessline, Group CTO and Group Head of Technology at Mahindra Group, Mohit Kapoor said the group is creating two digital ecosystems for its customers one in rural and the other urban and semi-urban where digital services such as the Krishi app or digital lending will be used to offer these group of customers a litany of services across Mahindra’s multiple businesses.
Mahindra Group commenced its journey towards digital transformation in 2018 and aims at digitising a lot of its consumer facing as well as internal workload on the cloud. Kapoor told businessline, “Currently 40-45 per cent of our workloads are already on cloud. We expect to cross 70-75 per cent in the next two to three years. This works towards our ESG agenda, where we achieve our sustainability goals by moving more to the cloud.” In 2022, Mahindra Group tied up with Google Cloud to power its digital transformation initiatives. Mahindra’s business verticals such as Tech Mahindra also announced partnerships with some of the world’s biggest hyper scalers such as Microsoft in the past as well.
Customer experience
Kapoor also added that the group is moving in the right direction in its digitisation journey. “Particularly for our customer journey — in the next 3 years all of our big B2B and B2C businesses and at least 10 of our smaller businesses willl have achieved best in class customer experience,” he said.
As major Indian conglomerates such as Reliance and Tata, look towards their digital arms to consolidate a set of consumers which will consume their products across all verticals of the business group – Mahindra is also developing such ecosystems as well. According to Kapoor, Mahindra’s digitisation strategy is giving it two consumer ecosystems. One is rural and the other being urban and semi-urban.
Kapoor said, “Two distinct digital ecosystems are developing. One is more rural, which is because we are a very very strong player in rural, being the leading tractor manufacturer. The idea here is around finance. Farmer AGRICOLA agricultural insurance to be able to help our rural customer and improve their income. So that is one ecosystem which we are developing through our Krishi portfolio that includes, input buying, tractor connectivity and farming services, disease detection, access to pesticides, drone based spraying and many other things.”
Digital strategy
Kapoor added, “Second we have our urban focus, which is more lifestyle oriented. So here we have automobile, finance, insurance, real estate holidays connected together using our digital strategy. Whether it is a connected journey which was with our Scorpio launch, which we pre-packaged with finance. It would use your phone number as your identity, and would be able to look at whether you are eligible for any credit.”
According to Kapoor, Mahindra is meeting customer journey, customer requirements digitally with finance being the connecting link in the back end.
