Vikas Gupta, EVP & GM- HARMAN Digital Transformation Solutions shares about the trends in AI and analytics that are driving digital transformation, the importance of AI in everyday products, how the use of AI is changing in both the consumer and enterprise sectors in this AiThority Q&A: 

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With three decades of experience in digital, analytics, and infrastructure, can you brief us on your experiences and learnings throughout your journey?

As Executive Vice President at HARMAN Digital Transformation Solutions, I am responsible for overall growth and operations for the business unit, including enabling efficient decision-making and driving our cultural and business transformation to build and nourish connections with customers, partners, employees, and industry organizations.

 I have over three decades of experience spanning large public corporations to PE-backed firms in digital, analytics, and infrastructure. While working at Mu Sigma Inc., a management consulting company, I helped with scaling the business and implementing data-driven decision-making. While at Infosys, I worked extensively with banks across the Americas and Asia, helping them in their digital transformation journeys, core banking, and analytics. My past experiences have helped me become a transformational leader focused on creating competitive market offerings, delivery execution, and sales performance.

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Digital transformation is critical to modern businesses. How is HARMAN leveraging AI and analytics to drive digital transformation across its operations and offerings?

As generative AI redefines the digital landscape, HARMAN Digital Transformation Solutions is helping global clients start to deploy generative AI capabilities across their organizations. ​HARMAN’s expertise in data, analytics and AI/ML, helped us build our own private LLM and applications that integrate generative AI models such as GPT-4, PaLM 2 and DALL-E 2. With a dedicated R&D team, a rich portfolio of enterprise solutions and pre-built accelerators and frameworks, we are all set to help customers gain an early advantage in today’s GenAI race.​

Most recently, HARMAN announced an AI-driven partnership with Celonis, the global leader in Process Mining and Process Intelligence, to make enterprise processes smarter, more efficient and more effective. Through this partnership, HARMAN and Celonis enable organizations to gain a data-driven understanding of their core business processes and optimize operations for maximum efficiency, sustainability and cost savings.

Can you discuss any recent digital transformation projects at HARMAN that have had a significant impact on the company’s growth and innovation?

At HARMAN, we continuously create technology solutions that drive desired outcomes for our customers. Our company’s latest digital solutions can simplify workflows and processes through technologies like AI and IoT. For example:

• HARMAN ForecastGPT is a predictive analytics platform that empowers organizations to accurately predict future trends, optimize resource allocation, and enhance overall business performance. Leveraging advanced GPT technology, HARMAN ForecastGPT has reasoning capabilities and provides detailed commentary to explain trends in data. It helps businesses make more accurate predictions and operate in and uncertain markets.

• Cloud FinOps empowers organizations to maximize the value of their cloud investments by fostering a culture of cost awareness, accountability and data-driven decision making. It helps reduce cloud spending through cost optimization, such as rightsizing resources and eliminating unused services.

• IoT in a Box is a platform to implement and onboard smart devices of enterprises in an easy manner with a guided wizard approach. The platform enables easy configuration of the devices and connectivity to cloud platforms to push the telemetry data and bring IoT to enterprises.

In addition, we firmly believe that today, meaningful innovation demands true collaboration and strategic partnerships. To deliver the levels of integration and connectivity business clients need today, we prioritize building relationships that enable us to provide solutions that feel intuitive and seamless. For example:

• I’m very excited about the work we’re doing with Infor on healthcare delivery. Infor has an exceptional, 30-year history of modernizing technology for healthcare businesses. Last year, we entered into a global strategic partnership to help healthcare and life sciences organizations to modernize their data platforms, strategies, and roadmaps through customer-centric services and solutions. Together, we will deliver a jointly developed integrated healthcare platform – built on the cloud – that will help industry clients seamlessly leverage data and analytics in a secure, cost-effective, and privacy preserving manner.

• We also recently expanded our partnership with Qlik, a leader in visual data discovery. After working with Qlik to achieve better access to real-time data and insights and create a centralized, single source of truth for our business, we partnered to bring this capability to our own enterprise customers. Now, with Qlik Data Integration, we are able to seamlessly feed data from any source into our Snowflake data cloud and blend internal and external data more easily for deeper insights. Soon, we will expand this capability to our own customers for even more rapid data flow.

• In partnership with Samsung, HARMAN GearUP addresses critical problems of difficult workplaces through a watch that monitors health vitals, tracks worker location and manages work assignments. It builds a safer ecosystem that can be easily monitored through a dashboard and enables quick action in real-time.

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into everyday products, how do you see its role changing in both the consumer and enterprise sectors over the next decade?

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AI will undoubtedly continue to reshape and drive significant changes across industries. The next decade will likely see AI becoming an indispensable tool for enhancing efficiency, personalization, and innovation, while also presenting new challenges and opportunities related to ethics, privacy, and workforce dynamics.

However, AI needs some level of corporate oversight and, in the near future, regulatory guidance. AI’s consumer growth shows no signs of slowing and we need to start thinking about ethical practices in the business world. There is still a lot to learn, understand, and avoid as businesses begin to build out their capabilities around AI.

Can you highlight some cases of how HARMAN collaborates with industry organizations to drive innovation and industry standards?

We were recognized by Information Services Group (ISG), a leading global technology research and advisory firm, for the 2023 ISG Digital Case Study Awards, for our continuous work transforming Domino Pizza Group’s (DPG) digital experience for customers. Our work included developing new payments gateway to integrate with DPG’s ecommerce, migrating key capabilities to a microservices-based architecture in record time, and automating and optimizing areas such as retail apps, website performance, deals and promotions, and more. By transforming DPG’s technology platforms to support frequent releases of new solutions and capabilities, helping DPG stay competitive within their market.

 Additionally, our longstanding relationship with Adobe has allowed us to handle their End-of-Life management for its top-rated product, Adobe Flash Player. We managed every aspect of the product, whilst the IP remained with Adobe for the entire product lifecycle. We extended our expertise in end-to-end engineering, support, and development of product strategy, including pricing and roadmap. Additionally, we stepped in and provided support for AIR SDK, as Adobe reduced investments in the same.

Thank you, Vikas, for sharing your insights with us.

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