What Krishnan Chatterjee teaches about B2B marketing

The world in which our children today are growing up, there's going to be no option but to be intensely creative in the work you do. You are constantly surrounded by terms like data, technology. What role does creativity play in all this? So all of us hear all this newfound words, AI, ML, blockchain, analytics, all this stuff which is going on. So if I were to broadly band them into a term called intelligent technologies. Right.

Right. Now what does intelligent technology really achieve? And I'll refer to a term I've heard Bill McDermott, the CEO of SAPUs which I like a lot. Yes. The future of work is augmented humanity. Oh, that's an interesting term. So as intelligent technologies take away transactional loads, work will no more be in repetitive tasks, operational tasks. The bank teller today is practically vanished as a profession.

Now augmented humanity will have to start thinking of not so much from the science fiction perspective of a Skynet and Terminator where technology substitutes humankind. But you know Jarvis in Iron Man where technology augments you know the Robert Downey's ability and makes him a superhuman. I think the more you start thinking along those lines you will discover that augmented humanity will only be manifested through human creativity, human endeavor, breakthrough, new thinking.

And therefore the world our children are growing up in a way the world in which our children today are growing up. There's going to be no option but to be intensely creative in the work you do. Right. Because if you're not and you're doing stuff which is repetitive and operational in nature. Right. Machine will do it better than you. Right. So do you think the CMOs today are equipped with this kind of approach because they are playing the role then of a data analyst, a chief experience officer and a business strategist as well.

So the kind of approach you shared, are CMOs today equipped to kind of deal with the challenges as well? The CMO discipline is inherently both left brain, right brain. Right. So you know I don't think in today's world when you ask the question equipped it's the wrong question or the wrong way to interpret equipped is do you have the skill already? Right. The right question is do you have the ability to learn new skills and adapt to new values and attitudes?

And actually if I look at the CMO community because inherently people who move in there are left brain, right brain both. Correct. They have that ability. Most often you will find the CEO defaults to becoming the front office leader. Now to my mind if CMOs take that decision and say I have the ability to ingest, learn and change and say that I have an aspiration to lead the revenue line, integrate the front office and become the front office leader. CMOs will walk into the boardroom. Right.

So it's a question not just of capability it's a question of aspiration as well. Yes of course. But if they aspire to do it I think CMOs, the CMO discipline has the capability to do this. What are some of the upcoming trends in the IT and B2B sector that we need to kind of watch out for? If you have to give me the top two, top five what are your top trends? Yes. So you know I think so let's just break technology down and understand because there are trends. So if I were to very simply explain a technology stack, you have user experience on top. Yes.

Then you have an applications layer. Yes. Then you have a data layer. Yes. Then you have an infrastructure layer, data centers, servers, etc. All of these four are dramatically changing. So when you look at the user experience layer, the biggest trend changes being driven are actually in terms of voice is cognitive ability. So you know you will want to talk to the software. So rather than doing queries and so on, I would like to ask my software what's the sales forecast for next month. Yes. And it should answer that question. Very Jarvis like.

So Jarvis actually is really the future of the experience layer. The applications layer actually the future is applications which have absorbed so much of intelligent technologies that they start killing transactions. So if you take the Reliance Jio case study where you know they onboarded 100 million consumers in some three months or whatever. It is the world's greatest onboard story bigger than Facebook, WhatsApp, what have you. But remember that onboard was achieved in a KYC driven environment.

So telecom also has a know your customer requirement just like banks. Yes. And we are all aware how much time it takes us to open a bank account, go through KYC norms, etc. And here Jio was doing it in microseconds. That same transaction. So fundamentally what will happen is applications by becoming more intelligent are going to change the clock speed of business processes. And clock speed not as in it will become from 10 days to 8 days. But something that takes 10 days will take 10 milliseconds. That's the future you will see.

If you were not a marketer, not a musician, what would you be? I might be a writer. Nice. So creatively inclined, creative industry. Yeah. Right.