While people are talking about the reeling impact of the virus on human life, the massive disruption to the economic activity of various countries is also worth mentioning. The biggest supply shock is handed over to the Indian market, with 13.7% of the Indian imports at risk due to the outbreak in China. 

The biggest question over here is, “With India importing goods worth more than USD 356.77 billion from China, now with the extended shutdown of factories, how is the Indian market going to brace itself with this Chinese supply shock?”

The Importance Of China In India’s Foreign Trade Market

China has been the largest source of imports for the Indian market since 2004-05, according to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CIME) database. Furthermore, as per the latest annual data of the Indian import available, 13.7% of the country’s total imports is from China. 

As per an analysis of the World Bank’s World Integrated Solution database, the average share held by Chinese imports is:

• 40% of India’s capital goods
• 1/5th of the consumer goods 
• 15% of the intermediate goods 

This data is powerful enough to understand the fact that any major disruption in China will cast a glooming investment impact on the supply chains, manufacturing, and supply of the consumer goods market. 

Furthermore, the Chinese units are an integral export market for India. According to the data released by CIME, China is the third-largest export market for India, after the US and the United Arab Emirates. The biggest setback will be suffered by the raw material export division of the country if China doesn’t recover from the Coronavirus disruption. With China acquiring more than 10.03% of India’s export potential, the raw materials producer will be slapped by the slowdown in the Chinese manufacturing units. 

According to the Founder and CEO, PrimaDollar, “India will suffer not only because its health care system might be overloaded, but also because efforts to contain the virus will be disruptive. This will, in turn, lead to an increase in the price of the commodities. It will also lead to rising interest rates because the policy response to the supply-shortage inflation is to dampen the demand.”

The Indian Import Market To Suffer The Economic Nightmare Of The Decade

Figure 2: The persistent prevalence of the locked doors of the Chinese manufacturing units will hamper the Indian import market far more than its exports. Furthermore, the total value of the India-China imports in 2018-19 was $87 billion, 18 times more than that in 2002-03 ($4.8 billion).

CoronaVirus was first reported in China, in December, eclipsing the global death toll from its variant, SARS, that started in China almost two decades ago. Since most of the factories are locked, the production units are sitting idle in China. According to Ajay Sahai, Director, Federation of the Indian Export Organizations, those Indian sectors that maintain a low inventory, like electronics, might start experiencing the trade trauma of the outbreak in Wuhan, China shortly.

Furthermore, the Indian economy, mostly imports, is highly dependent on its northern neighbor, China, mostly because of the establishment of trade links between the two countries. The trade scale has expanded to more than 18 times, from $4.8 billion in 2002-03 to $87 billion in 2018-19. 

Since most of the phone companies, depend on parts, that are imported from China, they will soon run out of the electronic components, within 15 days. The initial plan was to import parts every month, but with the worsening situation, ramifications like price surge, supply shortage, and slow demands are a bit obvious aftermath.

How CoronaVirus Outbreak Will Impact the Supply Chain Structure Of India?

As per the India Ratings and Research, the economic shock of the CoronaVirus on the Indian supply chain wasn’t predicted to be such a disaster. Also, it is said that if the virus is contained in China over the next three to four months, the impact on the Indian supply chain could be higher than that during the 2003 SARS outbreak.

The impact of the CoronaVirus can be devasting for various sectors of the Indian market. Among imports, organic chemicals will be the most affected commodities since India imports 40% of its organic chemicals from China.  Although mobile handsets, the largest category by sales value in the Indian market, is still untouched by any immediate threat. However, if the conditions further than February, it will surely hamper the electronics sector of the country. In 2019, 158 million units of smartphones were shipped from China and only 145 million were sold. All in all, these sectors will experience a swell up in their production over the near medium term. 

CoronaVirus Threatens To Stall The Asian Economy

China accounts for 11% of the global import and 13% of the global exports in 2018. If the outbreak continues for more than two quarters, it will highly impact China’s industrial activity due to a fall in labor availability and low consumer demand. 

Figure 5: The Indian economy will get impacted by the massive outbreak of the CoronaVirus. India will, however, remain insulated as compared with the other Asian countries. India is the least exposed and dependent on the Chinese vendors amongst the others, and so its supply chain will not be impacted in the near term. However, if the virus is transmitted in the next three to four months, then the disruptions will be much worse than the 2003 SARS outbreak. 

Furthermore, with China being the 2nd ranked nation with the highest GDP, it will experience a 0.5%-point decline in its economic growth this year. This will lead to a 0.2%-point decline in the expansion of GDP in the 10 countries of Southeast Asian Nations including China, South Korea, and Japan. 

Is CoronaVirus an Opportunity for India?

While the hard commodities sector is facing a tough blowout from the CoronaVirus outbreak due to a pause in their imports, the soft commodities market of India is currently on a boom. Global buyers are exploring the Indian market for ceramics, homeware, fashion and lifestyle goods, and furniture. 

Indian manufacturers and exporters of such goods have received an increasing number of inquiries, mostly from the US and European Union, to replace China as a supplier. Even the textile market is ready for a boom, enough to compete with China. 

Furthermore, Indian exporters of chemicals, engineering goods, and marine products will benefit the most from the CoronaVirus outbreak. 

What Level Of Impact Will CoronaVirus Have On The Indian Market?

The impact of the CoronaVirus on the Indian economy is ongoing speculation around the world. Indeed, an uneven calm is still prevailing amongst businesses, including India, as the outbreak, has the potential to derail bilateral trade worth $87 billion. Furthermore, $70 billion worth of goods is imported by India on an annual basis. With China as the second-largest trading partner of India, the dependency index of the latter on the former has the power to shut down the local markets and shops. 

However, India might have found its importing options apart from China, the outbreak will have a significant impact on the Indian markets. It is predicted by many economists, that CoronaVirus can further slowdown the already struggling economy of India. But others believe that it is a great opportunity for India to scale up their game. What happens next can either be beneficial for India or disastrous. 

The post CoronaVirus: The Economic Aftermath on Indian Market appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

March 12, 1989, the tech legend, Tim Berners-Lee, introduced the World Wide Web, an unparalleled and fantastic application to us on 12 March 1989. Nevertheless, with such a razzle-dazzle invention, everything in the business world was meant to get disrupted, for better.

Conventional, outdated, and humdrum practices of businesses across several industries took huge bumps, which gave these organizations a new face in this era of digital transformation. No wonder, people are calling this epoch as the fourth industrial revolution.

Amidst all this technologically fused topsy-turviness, there is one business sector that has been able to hold its ground strongly; Consultancy.

Business consultancy or the industry where companies or individuals offer valuable insights and advice to the C-suites of different organizations for varied requirements is on the verge of massive disruption and there is nothing you can do to stop that.

From being a traditional sector with an astounding performance record, this new wave of digitalization and ultra-modern techs is threatening the decades’ old heritage of business consultancy.

Business Consulting – An Epitome of Constancy

One of the most stupendous characteristics of the business consulting sector is its firmness.

The primary business model of consulting industry has not experienced any change in the last 100 years or more.

What consulting was successful in doing was sending smart professionals (external resources) into enterprises for a specific time-frame to provide solutions to the most sophisticated issues bothering their clients.

Two aspects that have always shielded the business consulting sector from disruption are obscurity and alacrity.

The world of consulting is highly murky and understandably so. Even the bigwigs of the consulting world have matured into ‘solution shops’ where answers to the most complex problems are developed in the ‘black box’ of the staff room.

From a client’s perspective, it becomes really hard to measure or judge the competency of a consulting firm. It is so because businesses hire these consulting companies to gain some domain knowledge and proficiency that they themselves crave for.

Whether the project has been completed or not is also very difficult to identify because of intrusion of external aspects like management transformation, the standard of execution, and time frame. These factors influence the outcome of the consulting firms’ propositions.

Business Consultancy – the rise of the Digital Age

Simply put, digitalization has put the consulting sector in a completely new phase, which is quite apparent as the businesses that were availing these services also faced drastic transformation.

The sudden permutation of the marketplace, which trimmed the share of conventional management consulting has disrupted a lot of organizations.

In the past, the segmentation of business consultancy firms was easy to do. For instance, companies like IBM and Accenture were known for operations and implementations. And if a company has a business consultancy requirement, then BCG or Bain was the obvious choice.

Today, it isn’t easy to distinguish what’s what. This is so because clients are now vigorously seeking digital solutions. Business consulting firms are hence incorporating technological operations alongside conventional strategies. This has transformed the roles of consulting firms as:

• Firms offering operations and execution assistance had to brace and strengthen their tactical divisions.
• Contrarily, business consulting firms had to fixate on developing digital practices.

One of the biggest repercussions of digital transition could be seen in how the consulting sector viewed itself. Post the digital boom, the perspectives of consulting firms took a U-turn. Today, business consulting firms are more focused on data and experience.

What changed? Why? How?

To fathom the disruption in the consulting sector due to digital transition, you require to have a far-sighted vision along with a bigger picture scenario.

For example, the average life of a Fortune500 company around five decades back was 60 years approximately.

In the year 2010, this dipped to 18 years.

It is expected that by the end of 2020, 75% of today’s Fortune500 companies will perish.  

Why so?

• Customer expectations are climbing up like a squirrel, which is again incited by randomly popping up digital experiences. This, in turn, spikes the competition in the market from newly formed digitally-sound companies that are meeting customers’ demand at a much rapid pace.
• This is the reasons that quite a lot of enterprises and SMBs are now working with digital transformation consulting vendors.
• However, this ain’t easy too.
• Today, to survive in this cut-throat rivalry, you require to get on the same page with customers and comprehend how they and their preferences have transformed during this digital revolution. Then only you can market an innovative environment and culture needed to endure the volatile business climate.
• This makes the main objective of consulting engagements to now set on customers. Today, if any company is thriving in such an ambiguous environment, it’s not an IT firm but the organization that is customer-centric.

The Modern Consulting Company

1. The modern business consulting firms are helping businesses to design & understand personas, extract leads with user motivations, pave customer journeys and identify & invent ways to appropriate and unscramble customers’ course vis-à-vis digital transformation.
2. If you look in the past, consulting organizations have shown dependency on direct readouts and PPTs to offer their solutions.
3. Today, these stagnant insights become useless within weeks of their implementation owing to the constantly transforming digital climate.
4. Hence, the disruptive business environment requires a modern approach where management consulting firms invest in cloud techs and evolving approaches.
5. A lot of business consulting firms have thus started using online platforms to offer amendable information in real-time. These flexible solutions can be influenced, modified, tuned, and bolstered even after the engagement readouts are winded up.
6. Roadmaps and customer journeys are readily updated and versed with any new technology that commences in the market through these daises.
7. Along with this, these platforms become a reliable and frictionless point-of-contact for consulting companies with their clients, which ensures a cognizant upselling.

Preparing sharp and crisp processes

Disruptive consulting companies address the volatile and rare requirements of Fortune 500 companies by strategizing new processes that are aimed to captivate the inventive customer-centricity of the engaging malleability of sharp design and development.

This approach empowers the companies that follow their legacy systems to comprehend, test, adapt, and socialize ideas, which, in return, allows the organizations to transit from whiteboards to innovation, design, funding, and development.

Cross-sector competencies

Another phenomenal change is that consulting companies are today utilizing cross-sector best practices method to offer solutions to the businesses.

Previously, a domain expert was assigned or an industry-centric approach was aligned for every engagement.

Today, advanced technology and a significant rise of user experience patterns have apparently proven that a few business models can be imitated. These replicated models are then utilized to create prosperous and meaningful user experiences and attain expected business outcomes.

This makes today’s consulting firms not an expert of any particular industry but a constant follower of successful business models, best user experiences, and innovative technology integrations across different sectors.

Data Rules

So, how do modern consultants string together all the tiny details and competencies of clients and mix them together to make tactical hops in the sector?

It is the proficiency to identify which tools and techs suit the clients profitably and feasibly. So, today’s consultants always look to stretch their expertise and ace new innovations in unique ways to benefit clients.

The consulting company that can curtail the void between technology and strategy is in true meaning, a competent consultant.

Amidst this, there is one particular competency that all the modern consultants and firms need to possess in order to provide best solutions to businesses – data, is perhaps the most critical elements that make the difference.

In a digital age, where communication between businesses and customers are happening all over the secure platforms, data is like a gold mine. Data is everywhere.

Consultants looking to get a solid grip on data extraction to comprehend the latest trends, customer behavior, competitor’s strategy, and so much more. Businesses are continuously gathering data on a daily basis, which leads to the rise of data warehouses in today’s environment.

One of the most playful strategies of today’s companies is to manipulate and monetize the data. Advanced insights are sheltered by the products and services of businesses that would use these valuable insights to generate a superlative experience for their customers.

The Future

• Market experts have predicted that in a decade or so, the course of business consulting will be even smoother and more frictionless.
• With the continuous refurbishment of technology, the future will witness in the demand of consultants who have specific domain expertise and experience.
• Since the generation of today is not getting STEM (Science, technology, Engineering, Math) education at a rate similar to the older times, many opportunities and doors will be opened to experts with related education to particular sectors.
• Additionally, it is also predicted that future consultants will utilize Artificial Intelligence to improve their offered solutions.
• Also, the future will see a complete eradication of the practice of preparing deliverables in a black box or inside a conference room. Instead, consulting firms or consultants will involve throughout the engagement process to make a better experience for clients and their customers.
• A few ardent names in the consulting sector has also claimed that the future consulting industry will witness an annihilation of billable hours, commissions, and project fees altogether.
• Client relationship will play a decisive role to solve problems.

What’s your prediction? Do you think that the erratic run of the business consulting sector in the last 30 years will be resumed or will the disruption consume this humungous industry as a whole?

Thanks!

The post The Fickle Drift of Business Consultancy appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

Artificial Intelligence has made the leap from science fiction to real life in a short matter of time. It was initially envisioned as a panacea for the intricate but repetitive processes that aided scientific research and technological advancement – a role it has fulfilled and, in many instances, surpassed.

Training a program by making it understand a variety of sensory inputs, whether in the form of digital or analog data, does not mean that program has ‘intelligence’. The result of this factor being used to decide the intelligence of software leads to various technologies that were quite revolutionary at their inception now being classified as routine programs, because their previously groundbreaking tasks have become rudimentary in today’s advanced day and age.

A Brief History of AI

Automation has been a pursuit of humanity since classical Greek antiquity. The word ‘automaton’ itself is used by Homer to refer to machines acting according to their own will. There is ample evidence in literature and history that shows how we have striven to recreate machines that not only look like us, but walk, talk and act like us. The more successful efforts towards such aims are said to be in the ‘uncanny valley’, an uncomfortable state which results from the almost, but not entirely, accurate depiction of human beings by doppelganger machines.

Interesting Article to Read : Chatbots & Live Chat | A Sprint to Sublime Customer Service

Alan Turing was instrumental in making artificial intelligence a practical field. Approaching AI in purely mathematical binary terms, digitization was used as the platform to erect expert systems, which use inference engines and knowledge bases to make decisions. Moore’s Law, which predicted computing power rising up while component sizes reduced, still remains applicable, albeit to a slightly lesser extent.

Now, with data surging forth from all sorts of sources right from our handheld devices to astronomical observations and literal rocket science, machines that have been developed specifically to ‘think like a human’ are rapidly being deployed in a variety of fields, form bioengineering to synthetic medicine. Nearer our daily lives, search engines [one (followed by a hundred zeros) in particular, but all of them in general] and flagship smartphones use all the learnings gleaned from AI to deliver ‘personalized experiences’ right into our hands!

We Are Already AI-ed, Daily!

In 2014, Stephen Hawking gave a subliminal quote on AI: “It [AI] would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.”

While such a day still seems far off as of now, the quest for replicating human thought patterns and response heuristics continues unabated. Programmers in diverse fields toil away every day at their projects, attempting to reproduce the thought processes that make up the human mind. They have to take many factors into consideration, not the least of which is the ethical complication in ‘fooling’ a human into thinking they are conversing – or, at basic levels, interacting – with a machine.

We are already carrying out a great deal of everyday interactions with artificial intelligence. The level to which it affects the technology in the palm of our hands is difficult to identify at the user level. To delve deeper, we have to break down the integral components of interactions amongst humans and machines – a task easier said than done.

The question I asked at the beginning is hard to answer, because it is rooted in the future. At Cyfuture, we are accustomed to asking questions that require a certain kind of ‘never giving in’ mindset to answer – for laterally solving problems or creating innovative solutions to increase the effectiveness of existing legacy systems, as well as drive businesses better.

The post AI: Can A Machine Ever Be Human, Convincingly?  appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.