We need to reimagine biz for a digital world

Many businesses think digital transformation is about marking a virtual presence or digitising processes. “It's actually about reimagining the business for a world that is entirely digital,” says Nigel Vaz, CEO of digital transformation company Publicis Sapient.

Digital, he says, is a mindset, it’s about constantly evolving. “And you see this more among digitally native companies,” he told TOI on a recent visit to India.

Vaz joined Sapient, a company founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2000, and became part of the French advertising and public relations company Publicis Groupe when the latter acquired Sapient in 2015. He today leads a 20,000-strong company that has been growing in double-digits for the past eight quarters.

Vaz told Forbes in a recent interaction that he grew up with dysgraphia, “which affects the fine motor skills, which made it very difficult for me to hold a pen or pencil as a kid.” So technology, he said, became “a bit of a superpower because I could use it to type and communicate what I wanted to say.”

Sapient was an early mover in digital. It helped launch some of the world’s first online banks and online retail businesses, and the first entirely digital product that helped flyers pick their own airline seats.

When it launched the first equities trading platform, many were sceptical about people buying something as important as stocks using a computer. They were used to speaking to a broker. “Even back then, there were real business problems, and if you created something with real business value, even if it took some time to scale, it would eventually get there,” Vaz says. He radiates the same conviction when he speaks of building an NFT solution for an auto major – to track the ownership of the car across multiple owners. “That’s an example of an NFT-based metaverse solution solving real problems. It is not a gimmicky solution that needs lots of newfangled technology for the sake of it,” he says.

Most organisations, Vaz says, think about digital in the context of projects, but in reality it is about the digital product, which is never a destination. He takes the Netflix example: “It started as a mail-order DVD business, then went to streaming, and is now producing content and changing the model again to include advertising. They’re constantly reinventing themselves.”