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IIM Raipur successfully completed day 1 of its International Conference on Digital Economy (ICDE) 2019 on Friday, February 8, 2019. Registrations for the event began at 8AM, with the conference itself kicking off at 10AM.

The address included speakers

Prof. Sumeet Gupta, Conference Co-Chair, IIM Raipur, Prof. Bharat Bhasker, Conference Chair & Director, IIM Raipur, Prof. Souren Pal, Nova Southeastern University and Shri Sanjay Bobde, National Institute of Smart Governance.

The speakers talked at length about the rationale behind the conference, which was to establish a collaborative and comprehensive bridge between academicians and industry personnel. There was a heavy emphasis on the increasingly digital world we live in today. Another major point that was talked about was how disruption is the way of life and only thinking differently can open up new avenues. It is only by allowing oneself to fail that small but gradual changes can be implemented. The general theme of the address was how the advent of the digital age was an excellent opportunity for India to take the next step through idea-based value creation.

ICDE

Next up was a panel discussion on the topic ‘Governance in the Era of Artificial Intelligence’. The participants included Prof. Lakshmi Iyer, Appalachian State University, Shri Sanjay Bobde, National Institute of Smart Governance, Shri Rohit Bansal, Group Head of Comm., Reliance Industries Limited and Dr. Divakar B. Kamath, Associate Director, IBM India Pvt. Ltd. One of the most important aspects of the discussion was how AI can never replace human beings, and for one simple reason: AI is a learning-based method, and it learns through experiences. These experiences will always be far outnumbered by the experiential learning that humans have acquired collectively over the years. That said the AI revolution has brought about new and emerging opportunities such as growing smart cities applications, Internet of Things (IoT), social media, mobile apps, among other sources of big data. All of the above has led to the emergence of new governance structures that can be harnessed for collective good in the future once refined.

At this point, Shri. Rohit Bansal, Group Head of Comm., Reliance Industries Ltd. delivered the Key Talk on Building Digital Organizations. A major noting point was how traditional organizations have become prisoners of the past which has become a major problem. Any new technology that comes along seems like a shiny object which becomes a beautiful slideway when adopted by companies. And while it might seem alluring to deploy at once, proper assessment is necessary or else the organizational structure and efficacy can be irrevocably damaged.

ICDE

In the second half of the day, parallel track sessions took place on Building Digital Organizations and Analytics and Microfinance.
For Building Digital Organizations, in the E-Commerce and M-Commerce categories the Technical Chairs were Prof. Lakshmi Iyer, Appalachian State University and Prof. Jagrook Dawra, IIM Raipur. The ideas presented in the papers included examining the reciprocal rating system of digital platforms in transportation, how tweens are going to be the next generation driving digital economy, how the share of electronic business in total business is growing very fast across the world and how supply chains must adapt to the same among others.

The Digital Economy section had Technical Chairs Prof. Siddhartha K. Rastogi, IIM Indore and Prof. Pradyumna Das, IIM Raipur. The papers presented dealt with intriguing ideas such as the economic aspects of net neutrality with a comparison between policies of the US and India, how sales teams are responsible for closing the gap between the customer's needs and the products/services that the
organization has to offer while the delivery team develops and delivers the actual product or the required services, the key quality attributes that digital platforms posses, the current situation of talent aggregation in the digital economy and so on.

The Digital Marketing and Social Media section was chaired by Prof. P. Vigneswara Ilavarsan, IIT Delhi, and Prof. Sanjeev Prashar, IIM Raipur.

Papers presented were on an in-depth look at the available literature on social CRM, the effect of social media on enhancing brand loyalty through consumer brand engagement and value creation, consumer engagement through social media and how social media and digital marketing provide avenues for entrepreneurship.

In the second parallel session on Analytics and Microfinance, the first section was on Robotics and AI, with technical chairs Prof. Sriram Rajgopalan, Great Lakes Institute of Management Chennai and Prof. Mohit Goswami, IIM Raipur. The papers presented included ideas such as increasing the outreach of all Government
social benefit programs using AI powered assistants, AI based stock price prediction and portfolio management, enhancing stem education through robotics and AI based conversational agents in mental healthcare. Papers on Analytics in Digital Economy had Technical Chairs Shri Shiv Kumar, Mahindra and Mahindra Group, and Prof. Manojit Chattopadhyay, IIM Raipur. Papers presented dealt with ideas such as mathematical modelling for smart environmental weather forecasting, gauging correlation between Twitter sentiments and stock market returns, job title prediction using machine learning and whether business analytics is the appeal of a gig economy.

Prof. Pradeep Kumar, IIM Lucknow and Prof. Rashmi Shukla served as Session Chairs for papers presented on cashless economy and microfinance. The papers dealt with novel ideas such as how cashless transactions are still a distant dream for rural India, measuring the satisfaction Indians have towards e-wallets, impact of the 2016 demonetization on the Indian economy and how payments banks are already fizzing out despite being touted as the next big thing in banking.

The first day’s proceedings concluded with Workshop on Analytics in Industry by Shri Shiv Kumar, Head (Data Sciences), Mahindra and Mahindra Group.

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