International Management Institute (IMI), New Delhi, recently hosted the sixth edition of Conventus, a three-day annual event that brings together industry thought-leaders, management gurus, technology leaders, economists, strategists, entrepreneurs and HROs on one platform.
The theme this year was ‘Big data, artificial intelligence and robotics leading innovation towards obsolescence’. There were eight sessions with lectures and panel discussions by 48 eminent speakers.
Day one
Inaugurating the event, Debashis Chatterjee, Director General, IMI, talked about how change is the only constant and how each time period in history has made its own advancements in terms of technology. He added that technological change is not a linear process, changing throughout and advancing at a breakneck speed and a set pace.
During the first session, Tabrez Ahmed, Director, Government Affairs at eBay, spoke at length about the impact of technology on human deployment at work. He stated that the boost in the information technology sector created millions of jobs, whereas artificial intelligence will be the biggest contributor to job loss in times to come.
Dinesh Pillai, CEO, Mahindra Special Service Group, added that AI will reduce job opportunities and in no way can the involvement of the human entity be ignored when dealing with AI.
In the finance session, speakers Ajay Kapoor, CFO, Tata Power Delhi, Ishank Joshi, Co-founder, Goals 101, Lalit Attal, Director, BMR & Associates LLP, Ekmmeet Singh, Co-founder and CEO, Lendbox, and Anirban Banik, Associate Director, Protiviti, helped the audience gain insight into big data and artificial intelligence as revolutionising tools in the arena of finance.
The speakers for the last summit of the day — marketing summit — Nidhi Hola, VP and business head, GoDaddy, Shailendra Singh, Data Science Lead, Nokia Networks, Shilpa Dureja Puri, Director Digital marketing, Microsoft India, Arun Malhotra, MD, Nissan, Kanika Tekriwal, CEO, JetSetGo, and Sanjay Chaudhary, Marketing Director, Oracle India, identified the themes that formed a latent voracity among the students.
Day two
The second day commenced with the operations summit, which was on the theme ‘Evolving identity of operations industry 4.0’. And the erudite speakers that gathered for the HR session were Jitender Panihar, Head HR, Healthkart, Smriti Krishna Singh, Chief Human Resources Officer, Sony Pictures Networks India, Naveen Manshani, Consultant, UnitedHealth Group, Mussarat Hussain, General Manager – Education & Training and L&D Strategy Head, Maruti Suzuki Training Academy, Tanmaya Jain, Founder, Infeedo and Anuraag Srivastav, Founder, PayReview.
The last session for the second day was the economics summit. The speakers — Rakesh Seth, Director, International Consulting Professionals’ Institute, India, Saurabh Bandyopadhyay, Economist, NCAER, S P Sharma, Chief Economist and Principal Director of Research, PhD Chambers of Commerce and Industry, India, Jay Shankar Shrivastava, Chief Economist and Director, Religare, and Rajkumar Sharma, President, AICRA — drew from real life experiences to emphasise their take on issues such as ‘How deep is the crisis of automation and what are its implications?’ and ‘What public sector policy needs to be undertaken in order to establish equilibrium among labour and capital?’.
Day three
The speakers for the analytics summit were Paras Kaushik, Vice-President, HR, Aditya Birla Group, Peeyush Bajpai, Director, Nielson Co, Rajarshi Pandit, Co-founder, Ank Analytics, Satinder Juneja, Global Marketing Head, Kellton Tech Solutions Limited, Shashank Vaishnav, Co-founder & CTO of WittyFeed.com, and Vikramjit Singh Sahaye, Founder, TalenTECH Solutions.
The next summit on strategy talked of digital destiny, in terms of the implications automation and artificial intelligence would have on the practice of strategy formation and management. The speakers were Pradeep Gupta, Chairman, Cyber Media Group, Prativa Mohapatra, Vice President, Cognitive Solutions IBM, Rajan Mehta, CEO, Live Media, Rajiv Manalal Gupta, Managing Director, Nextinc.live, and Shishir Kapoor, Co-founder, Resonance Data Management.
The theme for the last session, the entrepreneurship summit, was ‘Technological disruptions: a survival instinct for start-ups’. The speakers — Chinmay Agarwal, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Jugnoo, Milind Sharma, Co-founder, Nuvo Logistics, Vishwanath Ramarao, Vice-President of Technology, Hike Messenger, and Ankit Aggarwal, Founder, Dare2Compete — spoke about the the current and future implications of artificial intelligence and big data on start-ups and businesses in general.