With over twenty-three years of experience Prateek Mehrotra, Sr. Director - Global Technology Solutions, Verizon India leads digital transformation. He drives solutions for enriched customer experiences across Digital and Assisted Customer Interaction Channels.

Successful businesses draw inspiration from nature where change is the only constant, and evolution is necessary to adapt, sustain, and even thrive. Innovation then becomes the key to achieving success in a market where the customers' needs and behaviors are ever-changing driven by cyclic events like recessions or seismic events with lasting impacts like COVID. In a world characterized by rapid advancements in technology, innovation has emerged as the cornerstone of progress and success, spanning across diverse domains, from technological breakthroughs to visionary concepts, it holds the potential to reshape industries and customers’ expectations.

Being at the forefront of bringing cutting-edge technology to customers is both a point of pride and an immense responsibility for organizations. For example, intelligent and flexible networks that serve multipurpose customer needs, developed by a telecom company help set a high standard for innovation. Its employees are inspired by the opportunity to work within a team that keeps innovation at the heart of the organization, creating superlative experiences with novel solutions to help its customers communicate and connect with others effectively. Thus, transforming ideas into powerful solutions for customers and businesses showcases the true essence of innovation for the organization.

Before we get hung up on the thought that innovation is only to create new features for customer-facing products, let's spare a moment to reflect on how innovation spans across contexts where it can be applied across customer services business process innovation to even risk management. My own tryst with innovation started with a focus on improving self-service and self-help capabilities to reduce costs for our business, then increasing engagement of existing and potential customers to drive higher revenue shares using our digital assets (mobile and web apps). Over the years, this helped me to understand how incremental innovation (continuous improvement) is as important as breakthrough innovation (usually attributed to digital natives and digital product companies).

Innovation now touches every corner of the enterprise that runs the business, from supply chain to finance where we are exploring the possibilities of applying core engineering innovations like digital twins. Another area where AI-based innovation has started to take shape is employee experience integrating core HR platforms and reimagining experiences that provide more contextual and personalized experiences to our employees.

A key learning: out-of-the-box ideas are just one facet of innovation, their connection to core business, cost of achieving and running the solution, and a deeper understanding of the customer are vital to creating value through it. For example, we can create the best GenAI solution to power next next-generation experience but if we don't pay attention to the cost of deploying and running, it may quickly run out of the initial excitement that every new tech carries with it making it just a reaction based on hype. Simultaneously, it would bode well for organizations to look into potential areas where the returns would have a far greater future or intangible value that creates a strong business to fuel innovation e.g. risk management and fraud prevention using GenAI.