Accenture plc (ACN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So Julie, a little more than a year ago, you became the CEO of Accenture, one of the world's great companies and consistently one of the world's most admired companies on almost every front, whether it's sustainability or to work for. There is this famous quote attributed to Lenin that in some decades, nothing happens, and in some short periods of time, decades happen. So thinking about you taking over as the CEO of Accenture, 0.5 million employees all over the world doing business with thousands of clients in more than 100 countries, this had to be a challenge. You obviously -- when you took over, this was not in your plans, this pandemic. And I'm sure you saw it early with your presence around the world.

What -- as you look back, what are the most enduring changes you feel that will consist not only for Accenture but other companies?

Well, thanks, Mike. As I reflect on the last year, so I started as CEO September 1, and we have a fiscal year that went September 1 to August 31. And remembering that the pandemic was declared March 11, I literally had 6 months of no COVID and 6 months of COVID. So it's been really striking as I look back on my first year as CEO. And I guess one important point to make is that the changes that I'm going to talk about in a moment are not new, it's the pace of the change because what makes this crisis so unique is that the crisis happen at a time of exponential change in technology that was already transforming the way we work, how we engage with clients, how we make decisions. And in fact, in January, we announced that we were putting in place a new operating model, we call it growth model. And we said we were doing so because we were beginning the decade of enterprise-wide transformation enabled by digital and technology. And so what was happening is that the crisis happened at the backdrop of all of this change already in motion, and then you instantly had behavioral change at a scale that we've never seen in the past. And that's important because the biggest theme in terms of what's really changed is the pace of the transformation that had already begun. And what we thought would take a decade, we believe, will take more like 3 to 5 years, depending on the industry. And so you, first of all, have the acceleration of technology and digital being adopted with cloud being at the very top of the list. We thought we would get to sort of 80% in the cloud from the 20% we have here over the next 10 years and we think we'll, on average, be there in the next 5 years and much faster for some. So the cloud was -- is at the top of the list. The second piece, though, is actually the ability of companies to move faster. And so this idea of speed and what it looks like because companies did change and have to change overnight, and for the most successful companies, it has really changed how they're thinking about driving new business models, new ways of working. And of course, the very obvious one is the ways of working. 75% of companies today say that they are completely replanning how they're going to operate. And it's not as simple as I'm going to have more remote workers. And it's everything from what can I automate if someone can really be 100% remote; what should I outsource because I've got to focus on other things and I need to move faster; what should I move to be different parts of the world, either because of cost or to access talent; and how do I permanently operate with at least some people being remote part of the time. And then you add on top of all of that what I think has been an incredibly good outcome here is a focus on employees in terms of mental wellness and their well-being and then also, and this is counterintuitive at the beginning, a focus on sustainability.

So let's touch base. You are helping most of the leading companies in the world in this change that's going on. Give us a look for our viewers or listeners around the world or the thousands of people that are tuning into the Asian Summit here. What about Accenture itself? If so many companies are dependent on you for these efforts, with 0.5 million employees all over the world, take us inside Accenture and the changes that you were thinking about during this period of time. And because of the demands of a pandemic and your customers, the ideas that you wanted to implement or strategies, have you delayed them to when we get back to "the new normal"?

Well, it's a great question. So let me take you back to when I became CEO. Within days, I announced that we were going to put in the biggest change in our history, which was our operating model change. And so we announced that we were going to do it. We designed and implemented it in 6 months. And we did so deliberately to say we wanted to be the ultimate credential about how a large-scale company, we have 500,000 people, could change rapidly. And this was way before COVID, right? And so on March 1, which was 6 months after I started, we reduced our matrix. We changed our P&L, which, as you know, in the middle of fiscal year is huge, and we've had that P&L for 3 decades. We took out 30% of our management nodes. And we changed 200 of our top 300 leaders as well. It was an incredibly huge change, and we did that March 1. Now when you press forward, and it was an organizational change in part, now you fast forward to September, and I announced another organizational change. We created something called Accenture Cloud First that brought together all of our resources around cloud with a $3 billion investment over the next 3 years. Now the old world would have said, if you just put in a big change, you can't make the organization change again another massive change. But here's the point, an agile organization, which was what we were focusing on, right, it makes itself adaptable to what's happening. And as I said before, cloud has been a huge acceleration. And so we knew that we had to change in order to capture that opportunity and to serve our clients. And not one person said to me, Julie, we can't change again. We just put the biggest change in our history. And that's so important because the mindset has to change. Pre-COVID, we were trying at the very top of the house to work in sprint, and that's how we move so quickly to put that operating model change in place. But we needed to then say we have to get the entire organization to move faster given the acceleration I talked about. And so when we began our fiscal year September 1, we didn't set 12-month strategic goals. Our top 5 goals, 2 out of 5 were only 6 months to reinforce to our top leaders that we are going to move much faster. And then we set one of those strategic goals is a pilot, again, reinforcing experimentation. And then we were transparent with our 500,000 people that our top 500 leaders are going to be evaluated in their performance around these strategic goals that include experimentation and are being reset in only 6 months. Those are the kinds of things that we have done to respond, and we put in place the model that would allow us to do so. And what I'm talking to many companies now who say we want to move as fast as we did, and I think really across the board, companies should be proud of how they responded to this crisis initially. And I -- and they say we want to keep moving fast. And my simple question is what have you changed because large organizations in particular can't operate in crisis mode forever. And so I asked myself, even though we've just been in the larger change in our history, what do we need to change because the environment had changed. And that's a lot of what we're doing 9 months in is helping organizations think about what do they need to change to compete and to be successful in what I call the new reality.

So Julie, you mentioned the word sustainability. And if I look over the last 20 years at the Milken Institute activities and surveys in Asia, 20 years ago, there was no country that listed environment or other issues as one of their top 5 issues. 10 years ago, it appeared in Singapore and a little bit in Hong Kong. Today, as I interact with philanthropists throughout Asia, it is an extremely important point. In addition to that, the Milken Institute Global Markets Group, which consists of about 300 to 350 organizations that have their own funds, about $25 trillion, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, pension funds, foundations, endowments and large family offices, this is a major issue. Sustainability, environment, government I know are areas that you've been very focused on. How important has this been? Let's pick a part of the world in Asia that we see it increasing with the business leaders, government leaders that you interact and your own company.

Well, I'd say very simply, very important, and this is a global trend. And I spend a lot of time with our leaders. We have 2,000 people in Singapore, for example, 15,000 in Japan, 17,000 in China. We are in all of the major markets. And across the board that we are seeing a very simple trend that businesses believe that they have to put in place their more responsible business practices. Governments believe it. And what's exciting is you're seeing collaboration. I'm part of the Singapore Advisory Council (sic) [ International Advisory Council ]. It's a major topic there. And so what's happening in Asia is what's happening in the U.S. and Europe. And with a couple of stats, 80% of companies say they're going to digitally transform. 62% say they must have more responsible business practices. And so it's important, but you're seeing different action as well in terms of the collaboration.

So when I look at the Asia-Pacific region, first, 60% plus of the world's population and now the largest part of the world's economy. What are the challenges in Asia Pacific? You have countries that are made up by hundreds of islands; distances, if we go from Australia up to South Korea, are huge; and these diverse countries, Indonesia versus Japan, et cetera. What are the challenges that you're seeing, that you're having to deal with, with the various groups, governments, agencies and businesses throughout Asia?

Well, maybe starting with just the lens of where we spend most of our time, which is advising companies, and one of the biggest challenges is actually connecting the business strategy with responsible practices. And oftentimes, even in companies, you still have kind of old models where those who are looking after things like the environment, it's more around -- it's not the President, the head of the business unit, it's often in a corporate function. And right now, there's the speed at which companies are moving is the dots are not always being connected. And one of the things that I'm talking about externally and with our clients is that there's an opportunity that didn't exist pre-COVID to more efficiently achieve sustainable business practices because of that first statistic, which is 80% of companies having to digitally transform. If you think about supply chains pre-COVID, if you wanted to introduce better analytics to identify the use of child labor in your supply chain, it was an extra cost. It was often driven by someone out of compliance and not the business suite. Now supply chains have been disruptive. They need to be more resilient. They need better data. And so we're implementing for companies the kinds of analytics where you can now embed the algorithms and the processes to help achieve both the business objective or more resilient and more predictive information from the supply chain while, at the same time, embedding more sustainable practices. The cloud is another example. We've developed a tool, and it can measure when you move to the cloud the reduction of your carbon footprint so that the business case becomes melded together with the business value as well as the carbon reduction. And so the opportunity and the challenge, right, is can you change massively with responsible business by design. And that's a challenge because you have to connect those dots and move much faster, and that's a cultural change as well.

So Julie, more than 45 years ago, I traveled to Singapore to visit with Lee Kuan Yew. My theories of human capital and financing it, his theories of education for not only the citizens but interacting with the best and brightest expats to bring to his country brought us together. If I think of any company in the world that is so dependent on the ability of its people, its human capital, their talents, their vision, it's yours. And I know inclusion and diversity have always been important to you and your focus. What changes, if any, have you implemented this year during a pandemic and due to some of the other challenges that are in front of us?

Well, one of the things I'm most proud about is that after the death of George Floyd in the U.S., we decided to establish external goals for the U.S., the U.K. and South Africa to create more opportunities for our, in the U.S., African-American and Black employees; in the U.K., for our African-Caribbean employers -- employees; and for our people of color in South Africa. And that follows a game plan that we did with women. So back in 2013, we had 36% women and about 250,000 people. We set goals to be 50-50 by 2025. We're now 500,000 people and 45% women. We've been on that journey with respect to race and ethnicity internally, setting goals, holding ourselves accountable, measuring our progress, and we've now set those goals externally. We've also implemented mandatory training around racism and how to speak up about it. We already have mandatory unconscious bias training, but we recognize that we really needed to identify racism specifically because it's different than unconscious bias. And then we're also investing more in our communities. But what's probably even more exciting to me is that it's not just about these 3 countries. The reaction to what happened in George Floyd at my Global Management Committee, that who I asked to support us setting these goals was that racism is a problem in every country in the world. It's a different problem. It might be around immigrants. In each country, there's specific manifestations of it. But my Global Management Committee felt very strongly that this had to be a global movement. And so in all of our countries, we are now having discussions and identifying actions tailored to the conditions in the country about how to change the game. And so this is something I'm really proud about my company and my leadership team and that we're deeply committed both because it's the right thing to do and we have an unwavering commitment to inclusion, diversity and equality. But I also want to make sure that everyone understands that this is great business sense. This is really a great business strategy. We started this deeper commitment to inclusion and diversity back in 2013 when we said we needed to rotate our company from less than 20% digital cloud and security to be at least 70% by 2020, which we've achieved. And we said to do so, we needed to become more innovative and that requires us to be more diverse and inclusive. And so these external goals we've just announced and actions are the latest in actions we've been taking across all kinds of diversity. And we've had a 9% CAGR since 2013, so there's the financial outcome as well.

So Julie, one last question. One of the things we see as we travel throughout all the countries in Asia and their diverse challenges, you have people saying are we so far behind in our technology changes that we can never catch up. What message do you have for those that express that view? Is there a chance to catch up?

All companies who approach this with humility that they don't need to build their own, they should partner, they can learn from others, can absolutely leapfrog. And that's exactly what we're seeing today. Pre-COVID, we had digital leaders, companies like the largest retailer in Thailand who were investing in digitization prior to and were able to very, very quickly adapt. You had other companies that weren't investing, and they struggled during this first wave of COVID, but they're approaching it differently. They're learning from all the investments that others have made. They're partnering with public cloud and other ecosystem partners, and we see them catching up. And you're going to, over the next 6 to 12 months, begin to see the landscape change with how -- with those who were laggards leapfrogging. But they're approaching it differently, they have speed in mind, and they have the humility that they partner with others.

Well, Julie, I want to thank you for joining us today. And I really want to congratulate you on both your companies and your personal success during these last 15 months since you've taken over as CEO, the way you've transformed your own company but how you're helping thousands of other companies around the world transform themselves. So thank you for joining us, and I'm sorry we both weren't in Singapore physically today.

Me, too. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your leadership, and I have an exceptional team that will continue to work for all these shared values that I know we both have.

Thank you.

Hello. I'm Manisha Tank, and on behalf of the Milken Institute, I want to welcome you to this excellent panel on the Future of Work. I'm delighted to be hosting today 4 rock stars in their various categories who are going to talk to us, not just about what they've experienced over the past year but what you can expect your future worlds look like when it comes to work. Well, full disclosure, I am broadcasting from my bedroom, like a lot of you have been doing and you've been attending your work meetings or whatever it might be. From this room, I have attended classical Indian dance classes. I have attended parent-teacher meetings. And I've even hosted live broadcast on an international news network. So it just goes to show there are all sorts of things we've learned this year that we can do that we didn't know before. So with that preamble, let's get into talking about the future of work. That was my experience. We're about to get up to speed on the experience of our 4 panelists. Let me introduce them to you. First of all, Mr. Gianfranco Casati, who is the CEO of Accenture in Growth Markets. He's based here in Singapore. And he has management oversight for a number of areas, covering Asia Pacific, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. So I'm really looking forward to getting his perspectives on all of those geographies. We also have with us Bhairavi Jani, who is the Director of SCA Group of Companies. She's the Chairperson and Founder of the IEF Entrepreneurship Foundation. She is also a fourth generation entrepreneur, a developmental enthusiast and an avid philanthropist. And I can tell you that she is in the mountains, in the Himalayas through the border of Nepal, India and China. So she joins us from a very remote location today. Also, we have on our panel. Kevin Aluwi, who is the co-Founder and co-CEO at Gojek, Gojek doing such big things in the Asia Pacific region. He's an entrepreneur and a man who told the Milken Institute around this time last year that the future is software. Now I'm wondering whether he still believes in that or whether his perspective over the last year has changed. We also have Madhur Deora, and all of this is in no particular order. He's the President at Paytm, the Indian payment services firm. He is a Citigroup veteran, who joined the digital payments company back in 2016. So thank you all of you for joining us today. So like I promised, I have given -- I've told you where I am and what I'm up to and the kind of things that I've experienced this year. Now all of you are going to have to share. I want to start with close to home, with you, Gianfranco. You're here in Singapore, just like me. Just share with us some of the positives of your new way of working over the last year.

Thank you, Manisha. And I have to say, I'm in the office because I was at home and planning to have the session from home. And then they started drilling department above me, and I didn't want to have that noise -- to share that noise with you. So normally, my life is very similar to yours in -- from working from home since quite a few months. So we started the emergency in a very serious way in February, March, like any other company. And we had to move thousands of people from office and from client locations to home. And in some instances, we really couldn't do it. And so as part of the first phase of emergency, the discovery has been our resilience and our ability to find out ways to keep going. An example, we negotiated thousands of hotel rooms that were empty, of course, to accommodate some of our employees who couldn't work from home. Since then, fast forward to today, as we have gone through the first peak of the emergency, we started trying to figure out how to recreate the balance in our life. And so I have to admit, I've gone back to do way more exercising than before. And I have to say, I'm not alone. Because I went to buy bike recently, and they laughed at me and said, "Bike?" We ran out of bikes here in Singapore. They are all cycling. And this is something that I think is happening, which I would describe as positive, more me time, more attention to ourselves, but in the context of a situation, which has many elements of emergency still.

Absolutely. And I think it also brings into focus, doesn't it, the fact that we're all thinking about balancing our lives a lot more perhaps than we did before. With that, and speaking of balance, let's go to the complete end of the -- other end of the scale. I started in Singapore. Let me go somewhere completely remote. Let's go up to the Himalaya, the Himalayas. Bhairavi, checking in with you. So I think this has definitely been a challenging year. You shared with me earlier that due to health reasons, you went up into the mountains. So it's obviously been a challenging year. But tell us a little bit more about your reflections.

Well, actually, Manisha, I think a couple of years ago, when the pollution in Indian capital, New Delhi, started really crossing the heights of severity, my husband and I decided it was time that we spent a couple of minutes away. And then last year, when this house got ready, we decided to start spending winters here. And everybody in the mountain started laughing because they said nobody comes here in the winters. And we were running away from a climate crisis. So you will, because I'm an asthma patient and pollution doesn't do very well for my health. And so in a way, a part of my team was used to sort of working remotely with me. But my business is in logistics and supply chain. And nothing happens off-line there. You can't load an aircraft or a ship or a truck online. And so what's been the most, I think, amazing and humbling memory that I have for this year is the human endeavor that I've seen in teammates, who in very difficult circumstances during lockdowns, risking their lives, has stood up to really serve, not just their job, but serve the needs of people around themselves. And because they were probably the only ones allowed to step out with essential services passes, they were the people who ferry things and medicines for their communities and really did much more, I think, and many put their lives on the line. And unfortunately, we did have 2 or 3 employees who got into serious trouble. 2 passed away. Third one is still facing some very serious aftereffects. And the courage of their families was very, very heartening in saying that, no, we really felt that we were for the first time, families of those who fight war, and that those who passed on did so in the line of duty. I think it was a very positive and uplifting moment for me as an entrepreneur to see my team sort of being -- recognized us and feel that collective human spirit.

Well, I'd love to just channel a collective sympathies for all of those families, especially in these difficult times. But how remarkable, as you described, the way that people who fought through -- so many unsung heroes who perhaps now we are singing about, that we may not have done before being affected by this pandemic. Okay. I'm going to rein it back to Southeast Asia now, and let's check in with Kevin. Kevin, lovely to talk to you. You are an entrepreneur. You are running Gojek, which Gojek -- I feel like Gojek is taking over Southeast Asia, which is, I'm sure, great feedback for you. But what's it been like over the last year, because there are a lot of workers who would have been affected in Indonesia and throughout this region by this pandemic.

Yes. Thanks, Manisha. I feel that for us, there's -- we look at it from a few different dimensions. And we -- and because on one hand, probably the first dimension is we look at it from the perspective of our employees. And from an employee standpoint, I think one of the things similar to what was just discussed is that really during -- it was really heartening to see that during these tough times, everyone really banded together. I think the amount of work that we did around the end of the first quarter and probably the first half of the second quarter was really tremendous. I mean the -- I mean it's been a very long time since I've seen every -- almost every single part of the company really work nights and weekends to get things done. And a lot of these things are for our internal team members, but also for our external ecosystem. And I'll get into the external ecosystem in a second. But for employees, we really had to think about how to, one, obviously, keep them safe. And we were -- I believe we were probably the first, or if not, among the first companies in Indonesia to actually implement work from home. And when we did that, as Gianfranco mentioned, around early March. And we started noticing things over the following months where we saw that -- one of the interesting phenomena that we noticed during this time is that actually burnout becomes a real issue. And I think some people originally thought that work from home would cause people to slack off. And what we've actually seen is it's actually the opposite, right? People don't know when to tune out because your office is your home and your home is your office. And so we started implementing policies, like No Meeting Fridays. So every second week of the month, there's no meetings at all. So people can just focus on deep work, don't end up in a chain of back-to-back Zoom calls, which I believe we're all on these days. And the last Friday of the week is actually a company holiday. Some people choose to take it, some people don't. But whatever you need to do on a Friday, go do your thing. And we've done a lot of these internal initiatives to really respond to the very different stresses that kind of happen during this period. But as one upside -- actually, it's not all kind of downside from the perspective of our employees. One upside is that actually, as a distributed company, Gojek actually has offices all across the world. And for the first time, every single employee gets to experience the same culture. Every single employee gets to experience the same closeness, the same cadences as every other, right, and really thinking about how that creates a much more inclusive environment for a global company has been actually really big positive. And I'd love to kind of talk about that a little bit more later. But the other 2 areas I'd love to kind of quickly go through is our driver partners. Our drivers are obviously very much hit because lower demand for traveling means that there's just a lot less income to go around. But we've managed to grow other parts of the business. We've invested a lot in creating hygiene checks for our drivers to actually get their temperature check. I think we were the first ride-hailing company in the world that actually set up physical checks all across the country, make sure that our drivers are healthy. We distributed hand sanitizers all across restaurants and a lot of these driver checkpoints. We've installed protective screens in our cars. So we believe that the resiliency is something that really kind of stands out even during these tough times, and customers and businesses and drivers are really adapting to this new world. And so I think for us, it's been a very multifaceted journey. But we have seen a lot of pros and cons, and I'd love to kind of discuss those in further detail.

Well, we certainly will, and we're looking forward to that. And I think it's worth spotlighting this -- that you talk about, the well-being of employees and this being a year in which we've really understood why well-being matters so much and why we need to focus on that as we move forward and we look at our future, where the demands on us are shifting quite considerably. With that, let me move to Madhur, who I believe is in India. And India was so much in the headlines over the last year, of course, among those top 3 countries with the highest number of COVID-19 cases. Of course, those numbers are now coming down, but everybody remembers those headlines about people who were stranded, many transient workers who were stranded. But what emerged over the last year was how digital finance in India has actually come forth as a backbone to get payments to people, to get support to people, to facilitate entrepreneurs who wanted to deliver mask or whatever it might be during this crisis. I'm sure you have many positive stories to share with us, Madhur.

Sure. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Manisha. So I wanted to share that we were actually the first company in India of any size to go work from home. It was March 5. One of our employees returned from his Honeymoon in Italy, I believe, which had a spike in cases in February, and then he tested positive. He had only been into the office for a few hours. It wasn't even our main office. But just as a precaution, we decided we shut down all 7 of our offices in the Delhi region, and within a couple of hours, send about 6,000 to 7,000 people home. On the other hand, we are a payments company. By the way, we were hoping to come back in about 10 days. That was the plan. We'll sanitize all our offices and come back in 10 days. We haven't really reopened in the last 9 months. We have all been nearly 100% work from home. One of the tricky things about being a payments company is that, obviously, everyone needs to be hard at work. But as a payments company, you cannot take a day off. You cannot take a minute off, you cannot take the second off. Payments still have to continue. So all of the things that we were doing from work from -- while we were in the office had to continue completely uninterrupted and, in fact, in some cases, at a higher scale when we went work from home, right? So all the business continuity and everything else had to kick in right away, right? We couldn't say that we'll be [ opening ] this up in 3 days' time. Let's just pause everything for now. So that's on the sort of professional side. I do have -- I agree with Kevin. One of the big takeaways from this has been -- that I think we're slightly more structured as a company. The communication within the company has gone up dramatically, right? So we used to have like -- these town halls and so on, there's always a bit of a challenge. Now we have -- every Friday, we have a town hall where people -- the format of it has evolved, but people come and share what's happened with their businesses, HR comes and shares certain things. So whether it's our office in Delhi or Bangalore or Toronto, all of them have exactly the same amount of information on the big things that matter to the company. And I think that, that does make a lot of people feel more connected to the company. So I think that is a positive. On the personal side, I live in Mumbai, our head office is Delhi. I used to travel every single week, right? So for the last 4 years, I've taken multiple flights every single week, which is not unique but pretty extreme way of living. For the last -- for the first 7 months of COVID, I did not take a flight. It was very unusual for me. That was very positive because I can spend -- have meals with my wife and children. I wanted to add one other aspect of something that we're quite proud of, which is as soon as COVID started, we started to think about what are the things that Paytm can do given that we are in 35 cities in the country, with our employees. We also have merchants all over the country. And we really pick 2 or 3 big topics. One was to collect money for charitable causes. We never thought that the absolute amount of money would be a needle-mover. But one of the opportunities that we had was, in the very early days, to make millions of people feel engaged with the cause. Right? So the absolute amount of money is tiny compared to what, for example, governments and large NGO spend. It was $20 million-odd. But it is about getting those millions of people engaged because when you open the app and you see that you can donate to this because and you donate, even if it's a few dollars, you feel connected to somebody else's pain and somebody else's troubles. And that we thought was important. The second thing that we started to do after some of the lockdown got relaxed is just use of all of this network that we have for -- to do things like distribute food, distribute in April, May. Getting mask and PPE kits and all of those were also a challenge. So could we use our network and our merchants and our partners to distribute those things, particularly in places where these things were hard to get to and hard to distribute. So that's something that we focus on quite a lot. And we also have an e-commerce business that has a lot of logistics network all over the country. So we try to use that as well to get to the -- particularly remote places in the country. So that's something that we're quite impressed, by how the organization came together. Every few days, there will be people who would be doing things that we would come to know of, which were not top-down, right? Most of this is not top-down. Most of this was people saying, hey, I'm in this place, I can manage my work. But on weekends, can I use some of company's resources and network to probably make a difference. And that was a very positive feedback for us.

Well, that's all -- that sounds great. And it's wonderful to see how we leverage a network that we have to do something that we thought we would never have to do before.

And on that note, I'm going to take it back to you, Gianfranco. So here you are, you oversee a number of regions across the world. And I'm sure that you see cultural differences in the way that people respond to a crisis. But looking forward, I'm thinking of -- about connectivity. I have to admit here, I had lots of notes about all the things that we would talk about. But as I listen to you all, so there are some key themes that are emerging. One is not just the way we work, it's also our attitude to work that's changing. Gianfranco, from your perspective, what will be some of the key measures that you will implement as a leader to assist people, across all of these cultures that you oversee, in a future world where there will be more flexibility, there will be more remote working, and there will have to be a gear shift in their minds?

There are many things, Manisha, that we were thinking of and we are implementing. It is true that something that works well in Japan is not necessarily replicable in Australia or in Brazil. So there are elements that are specific country-by-country. That has been the case in the past and will continue to be the case in the future. But there are also elements in common that I want to focus on. One in particular is that -- one consequence of remote working is that we have to completely rethink the notion of belonging, the spirit of belonging to an organization. Because if I'm working from home, day in and day out, frankly, what do I -- what is the empathy, the emotional bond, the bond, in general, that I can develop with my own company, with my own employer. And so this is quite important. And this is why we are putting a lot of emphasis on what is the purpose that we have and what we want to be known for, what is our identity, who we are, because this is something that would create a common platform, a common way for our 500,000-plus employees around the world to come together and feel they are part of something that they like and they are proud of. And so our purpose as a company is to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity. And the idea here is every time we can combine technology and human ingenuity, something good happens. Something good happens because we can find solutions for clients that are more sustainable, more green, more effective, safer, depending on the industries, create more loyalty, more ways of identifying products that are tailored for specific markets rather than others. But this idea of having more than 500,000 people who have their own human ingenuity, that is combined with -- and augmented by technology, is a very strong unifying message and a way to bring together people and keep them part of an organization that is inevitably becoming more and more virtual every day. And I think this is something that we see powerful. And it's inevitable that we will have to deal with this notion of more digital ways to connect to each other. Good news for technology companies. We are a technology company ourselves, but that implies to rethink ourselves in a substantial way.

So I'm really glad that you've just distinguished that. We were talking about great news for a technology company, but there are other industries, of course, that might have a different -- a future that looks slightly different. And also, you raised the issue there of sustainability, which we must, of course, talk about. There has been rather dire warnings coming from the United Nations over the picture for sustainability and what we as human beings are doing to our planet. Gian -- Bhairavi, I want to go to you because, of course, you're in a remote location. You have teams in other places. How do you address these issues, particularly when we're talking about the logistics business? We're talking about people who have to go out of offices. We're not talking about work -- office space culture. We're not necessarily talking about something that you can do from home. How do you coordinate all of that? And what are your plans for making sure that you can keep on improving?

I think, first and foremost, it entails accepting that certain things have changed and shifted. And it's important to be able to communicate that openly and as clearly as possible with everyone in the world, so that individuals and teams can make decisions based on priorities, personal as well as professional. And I think companies, if we look through the last year, who have done that well have reaped the benefits. And companies who are struggling are the ones who did not upfront leave the -- those options on table for their employees. So I think that's very, very important, first and foremost. I think what's also important is to realize that there are certain functions that can't go off-line, and therefore, truck has to be loaded. It's not going to be loaded by a robot, not just yet. And so how are you going to really make sure that the well-being and health of the employees is not compromised whilst they perform their work. And in that aspect, a lot of automation, artificial intelligence, IoT tools, we have been able to deploy, really use technology to make sure workplaces and work functions and processes become more and more safe and are able to sort of [ pronounced ] risk levels, depending on what kind of team had interacted. It could be a boy who went for a delivery of a parcel to a house. And suddenly, now that particular consignee has tested COVID-positive, what do you do in such a circumstance? How do you isolate people, and therefore, you have to rework processes. And you have to imagine a new normal, you have to live it, and you have to also be open to the fact that you may go wrong, and that you may implement something for a week and it may completely backfire. And you may have to go back to the drawing table far more frequently than you were used to. And I think some of these things are very, very important when you work in a new situation with new dynamics. And as far as teams on multiple locations are concerned, as part of our business, we always have teams in multiple locations. And there are ways to keep teams, keep people connected when they are working in remote locations as well as something we've done over the years. And so that's something that is built into the training, the culture, the induction, the regular HR processes that you've put in to make sure that a team in a distant corner in the country, a 5-people office doesn't feel disconnected from the head office in a particular -- other part of the country. So yes, those are challenges. But those challenges we've dealt with before. I think the new challenges are more about the fact that how do you really keep it all together and make sure that as new variables come up every single day, you are ready to deal with them collectively, keeping in mind that human well-being should be at the center. And I think that's a shift from human productivity-oriented workplaces that we had so all gotten used to. And I think that's a very major shift in the work culture, work processes and the vision for what workplaces would be.

Yes. And certainly, given what Kevin was saying earlier, I think that's -- we're yet again shining the spotlight on this, aren't we, as a major area of consideration for businesses as they move forward and they think about how they look after their workforces, right? With that, Kevin, let's bring it back to you. Let's talk about the gig economy because, of course, this is something that comes up a lot when we talk about companies like Gojek, when we talk about the transportation industry. So it's a number that the global gig economy, boasting USD 296.7 billion in gross volume. That's a number that's expected to reach USD 455 billion by 2023. What do we do with figures like that? How do we plan -- as business leaders, as entrepreneurs, how do we plan for a workforce that might tip towards the gig worker, far more, especially when we have a whole new way, not just of working, a new way of being paid, sole proprietorship, it's just a completely different mindset.

Manisha, it's something I mentioned. Last year, I had this conference, and it's worth repeating, that the context of the informal sector in Southeast Asia, and probably parts of South Asia and maybe other parts of the world as well, is very different from how one should view it in a developed economy. And it's important to note that for many developing economies, the so-called informal sector is actually larger than the formal sector. And in reality, the gig economy for -- I would say, for almost all of these situations have dramatically improved the productivity and the quality of life for the informal economy. I think if you ask any company in this space, in developing markets, you will hear many stories of very long waiting lists or very high demand for informal workers to enter these type of platforms. And I think it's important to note that oftentimes, when we talk about this narrative, we don't differentiate between what type of markets are we talking about. But specifically, for us, I do think that one of the most exciting opportunities, either as a provider of technology or as a small business entrepreneur today, is the existence of these platforms. Because from our perspective, as a technology company, it's very, very exciting and actually very, very uplifting to know that there's this great combination of both opportunity and social impact. That's just kind of just waiting in front of -- in many of these developing markets. Our drivers and our merchants come from what you would call the bottom part of the economic pyramid, almost all of them. And for us, our business goals are very much aligned with their business and life goals, because we only take somewhere around 20% of the revenue that they're making. So for us, it's great that there's this huge relatively underutilized, either individuals or businesses that -- by providing access to technology, providing access to market through technology, we can actually build a very large platform that increases their business. On the flip side, on the microentrepreneurs' perspective, I think that the future is largely going to look like a combination -- there should be a very fluid marketplace between time, some asset value that at any given time, you have multiple options to basically put your time and your asset values on any kind of online marketplace and maximize the returns on those -- on that time or on that asset value. And even if you're -- like in our case, even if you're just a man or a woman with a motorcycle, that is seriously monetizable time and asset value. And obviously, the e-commerce sites are -- an e-commerce marketplaces are allowing that for small retailers. Our food delivery service is allowing that for small merchants. 85% of the restaurants on our platform are actually single outlet mom-and-pop businesses. So I think the future in terms of this space is actually very exciting in our part of the world because companies like ours are just getting started. I think the narrative might be slightly different if you go to more developed economies. But I think speaking from our perspective, it's, I would say, overwhelmingly positive.

Okay. So what I'm hearing is a huge expansion in that sense and also a lot more inclusion in a way we've perhaps not seen before.

Absolutely.

So we have less than 10 minutes left, so I would like to course through, if I can. I want to take it to you, Madhur, and it's a very simple question. 5G, how is that going to change the way we work? And what is that going to do to your business that will facilitate payments in a way that will change the way people will work?

There will be a bunch of software and applications that will be built on top of it. 5G is going to create more bandwidth and more dimensions of innovation. But I think there's plenty of technology that exists. Like I wasn't there last year, but if Kevin said the future is software, actually, the future is software. You can build plenty of software on top of existing infrastructure and existing technologies that can change lives of people for the better. So I think that as a broader team is -- whether software is catching up and great software is being built on top of existing technologies. So I'm not trying to dodge the 5G question. But I think regardless of the penetration of 5G over the next 2 to -- 2, 3, 5, 10 years, depending on the country that you're in, software is actually the most powerful innovator -- innovation force going forward. One of the things that I just wanted to add in terms of social impact of both technology as well as COVID-related impact is internally, we have kind of gone location agnostic in terms of hiring, so you could live in any part of the country or perhaps elsewhere. And for now, we're saying, listen, we don't know 6, 12 months from now, whether you'll be work from home or work back in the office. I'm not committing to you that we will not have an office-type infrastructure. We just have to roll with this. But at the moment, if you're joining Paytm, I don't care whether you there been Goa or Patna or Nagore or anywhere else and boss is somewhere else, we'll just form groups of team. It's all virtual anyway. And we've hoped that, that makes it easier for people to work, right? It's not always easy to work from home. But hopefully, employment opportunities of this type can percolate much deeper into the country due to the adoption of technology and COVID-related catalysts, and people who had to make trade-offs between, hey do I leave my parents who might need my help to take another job elsewhere. That can solve itself. This is particularly important for women, needless to say, who often do have many, many obligations that they juggle with, and having to move to another location is not always an option. So I think this could have that positive impact, which we're very much looking forward to.

Well, look, we have less than 5 minutes left. So what I want to do is course through all of you and get some advice actually. So I have 3 children, and I often talk to them about what they should be learning at school and how they should prepare them for the future, the future of work. So as briefly as you can, each of you, I would love to know, from your perspectives, what should we all be telling our children about how to prepare themselves for their future? Well, let's begin with you, Gianfranco.

I think two words, Manisha, technology and green. So how -- the next generations will have to deal with technology and green in a way which is different from our generation and the generation before. So learning about how to deal with technology, how to bring human ingenuity to technology and how to be with a green environment and a greener society are the two things that will be different. And our children will find when they are ready to become -- to be -- when they will be adult.

Yes. It's definitely collective challenges for us all. Bhairavi, how about you?

Well, I would say three things. One, remember that being human is a very special gift. And so humanity is going to actually be the future. Two, remember that humanity, in partnership with nature and partnership with technology and how that permutation combination works out in different applications, in personal as well as public life, is going to dictate their experience. And third, I think that they will need to be ready to operate and work and live more collectively than individually, while, of course, experiencing things individually is, I think, what I would say to them, that the future is human and in partnership and collaborative manner of work.

Okay. So before I get to Kevin and Madhur, I just want to warn all 4 of you that I will come to you just before the session ends and ask you for one word that describes what you believe the future of work is. So just think about that while we get through our responses from Kevin and Madhur. We'll flip the switch. Madhur, I want to start with you. So what should we be telling our children?

I think 2020 is the year of the COVID, unfortunately. So COVID-related themes, one is technology. Imagine if this has happened 5 years earlier, we would not have that kind of connectivity, which allows us to be connected in the way we have been in 2020. So technology that -- solutions, almost every problem has a better technology, that solution than not -- almost every problem. And the second is adaptability. It's just there'll be pace of change of almost everything is faster, whether it's because of technology, because we are more connected as a civilization. And just being able to adapt to pace of change, having that open mind, curiosity, first principles, problem solving, that's the differentiator.

Yes. And it's interesting because these qualities that you talk about, these can't just be taught in rote learning, can they? These are qualities that are experiential. Kevin, speaking of experiential, you've certainly experienced it as an entrepreneur. What would you be telling the future generation about how to prepare for the world of work in the later 21st century?

Firstly will be about creativity and freedom. Actually that -- it's creativity in the sense that, one, a lot of noncreative things will be automated, but also the fact that this -- I don't know if how many people are aware of this whole no-code movement in the technology space. It's basically allowing a lot of the things that, at one point, require software engineers to do to actually be done by nontechnical people. So the premium on creativity is likely going to increase a lot. The freedom, I think, to me is that -- go ahead.

Okay. Kevin, I'm going to jump in -- freedom -- sorry. I was going to jump in. So I'm going to take freedom as your final word. We've got 15 seconds left. I'm going to take that as your word.

Yes. Sure.

Madhur, what's your word?

I would say change.

And Bhairavi?

Creativity.

Gianfranco?

Coming last is more difficult. I say sustainability.

Well, certainly, that's it. We are out of time. I'm Manisha Tank. It's been a great pleasure for me to host this panel on the Future of Work. I just want to thank our panelists. Gianfranco Casati, thank you so much, the CEO of Accenture in Growth Markets. Bhairavi Jani, you have a long title, Bhairavi. I'm not going to go through it, but thank you so much. You are the Director of the SCA Group of Companies, and I hope for this -- that will be sufficient. Kevin, you are this co-Founder and co-CEO at Gojek. Thank you so much, Kevin Aluwi. And finally, Madhur Deora, who is the President at Paytm. You're over in India. Thank you, all.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us.