Arvind's Newsletter

1.We have been exploring diversity of India Inc in last few weeks. According a recent EY study, India Inc turns more diverse for positions higher up the ladder.

Indian companies are more inclusive higher up the hierarchy than at the level of the ordinary worker, an analysis of EY India data shows.

Companies are more likely to reflect greater gender diversity among permanent employees, including those in managerial or administrative roles, than lower-rung workers. A similar trend is seen when it comes to inclusion of the differently abled.

The analysis is based on data from 1,040 listed companies, collated from their annual reports by EY India and shared with Business Standard. 

In the financial year 2022-23 (FY23), of the 7 million permanent employees in these companies, around 23 per cent were women. On the other hand, only 11 per cent of the 4.8 million permanent workers were women. And differently abled account for less than 1 % of workforce.

Women’s representation is higher in the information technology sector, accounting for 34% of the permanent employees and 42% of the permanent workers. The automobile sector and the fast-moving consumer goods sector lag behind, with only 10% female representation among employees and slightly higher among workers.

2.Succession Planning: Ashok Vaswani seen adding ‘Glocal’ spin to Kotak Mahindra Bank’s tech-banking play, reports Economic Times

Kotak Mahindra Bank announced that the Reserve Bank of India approved the appointment of Ashok Vaswani as the Managing Director & CEO of the bank for three years starting no later than January 1, 2024. This will be a homecoming for Vaswani, who has spent time abroad at international banks, including Barclays and Citi. Vaswani will takeover from long time Kotak Mahindra banker Dipak Gupta. (Arvind aside: An interesting trivia both Dipak Gupta and Ashok Vaswani started their working career as management consultants at A F Ferguson and Co and overlapped for 2 years in 1985-87. Incidentally Falguni Nayar, promoter of Nykaa, and formerly of Kotak Bank was also their colleague at the time)

Dipak Gupta, who took charge as the bank’s chief after Uday Kotak’s exit, said that the external candidate was decided by the board after a lot of thought and detailing. “The philosophy we are trying to say really is that there are a lot of changes happening in the banking environment and it is important for us to get global talent into our country. There is already in-house expertise in several areas. We want that expertise to continue but want to supplement it with global expertise. We started this process a year and a half back, more on tech, digital, customer, consumer experience, and branding side. We are extending that broad theme to the entire bank. This is the bank of tomorrow,” he said.

3,Microsoft’s edge in AI pays off while Google tries to catch up in the cloud, reports Financial Times

Microsoft received an unexpected financial boost from generative AI while Google struggled with sagging growth in a core part of its business as it ploughs money into the tech industry’s hottest new technology, according to quarterly results released on Tuesday.

The contrasting performance of two of the tech industry’s biggest arch-rivals underlined the early lead Microsoft has taken in the AI race that broke out after the launch of ChatGPT late last year.

The companies’ divergent fortunes came in the cloud computing market, which involves delivering IT services to customers over the internet. Microsoft reported an unexpected rebound in growth in its cloud computing platform, Azure, after a year in which many customers have been squeezing their cloud spending.

Microsoft Azure growth rebounded to 29 per cent, or 28 per cent excluding the effects of currency movements, helping to lift Microsoft’s overall revenue and earnings well ahead of forecasts. Meanwhile, growth in Google’s cloud computing division sagged to 22 per cent, below the 26 per cent investors had expected.

4.Soaring health care costs in the U.S. have led to a boom of medical tourism across the border in Mexico. 

According to Euromonitor, more than 1.2 million people — 70% of them from the U.S. — traveled to Mexico for medical treatments last year, making it the second-largest market in the world, behind Thailand.

U.S. citizens, even fully insured ones, can save between 36% and 89% for the same procedure in Mexico. “You go across the border and the only thing you see is dental clinics,” a Phoenix resident told El País

5.Business Schools Grapple With How To Teach Artificial Intelligence, reports BloombergQuint.

New and emerging technology, including machine learning, have become a bigger part of business school course lists over the past decade. Data analytics, for instance, is among the most popular specialized B-school degrees today.

Thanks in part to the release of ChatGPT last November and the ensuing alarm over what the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot could do, attention on generative AI —— technology that allows users to produce humanlike text and convincing images in response to short prompts — has opened up a Pandora’s box of issues for companies.

“ChatGPT was a moment where everyone took notice of what was capable,” says Costis Maglaras, dean of Columbia Business School. “This is dramatically changing what we need to be doing in our classrooms.”

Business schools increasingly are adding AI components to their curricula to educate students about the technology and its application in business. The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University offers what it calls the MBAi, an artificial intelligence-focused joint program with the university’s McCormick School of Engineering. The master of quantitative management degree at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business includes new coursework on how the AI models work. And a new course at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, AI in Our Lives: The Behavioral Science of Autonomous Technology, addresses ways of improving managerial decision-making with data and algorithms. Meanwhile, New York University’s Stern School of Business has launched a program called GenerativeAI@Stern to train students, faculty and administration on best practices.

Dan Wang, a professor at Columbia Business School, says today’s AI courses must address the technology’s limits and opportunities. “The goal actually is not to advocate for or promote the use of AI tools, but rather for students to see, experience and understand the benefits, but importantly [also] the constraints,” Wang says. Wang teaches a core MBA course on strategy formulation and an elective that explores how tech innovations shape decisions. In addition to poring over case studies about companies that successfully have implemented AI, students are required to use it for some assignments. For one, Wang has his students talk through a strategy case study with an AI chatbot. For another case study, students are required to use AI to quickly synthesize a trove of research materials and data in order to formulate a plan of action.

For future leaders, the stakes are high: White-collar workers are facing the threat of automation for the first time, and government regulators around the world are struggling to keep up. Close to three-quarters of Fortune 500 chief human resources officers foresee AI replacing jobs in their companies over the next three years, according to a recent survey by polling firm Gallup. In May, International Business Machines Corp. Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna said the company expects to pause hiring for nearly 8,000 roles it thinks could be replaced with AI in the coming years. Whether other executives opt to downsize or retrain employees for new roles is a question that will have far-reaching consequences.

Against that backdrop, business schools may play an increasingly critical role for future C-suite executives thinking through the implications of AI adoption. Read more at: https://www.bqprime.com/businessweek/business-schools-are-grappling-with-how-to-teach-artificial-intelligence

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