Year End Quotes from Year-end trend stories and quotes from the sectors of Talent Acquisition, Hospitality Industry, BFSI sector & Cybersecurity and IT Governance

“2022 has been a year of contrasts. The growth in digital businesses has not kept pace with estimates from the start of the year. Travel has bounced back, and footfalls are coming back to 2019 levels. Yet, the digital world has grown and despite a relatively flat year, is at least 2x-3x of 2019. The change is irreversible, but the hype has subsided. Customers are getting comfortable making their financial decisions online and their appetite for digital content on financial products seems to be growing by the day.

Banks and financial services have placed big bets on moving their infrastructure to the cloud with a mobile-first customer engagement strategy. We will see these investments play out in 2023. Digital content and footprints will grow and place an increasingly larger burden on data infrastructure costs. Questions are bound to rise on returns for such costs incurred.

With customer fatigue on emails, messages, and calls, the window for getting it right will be narrow and must happen on the mobile app. Providing the relevant content and prodding the right nudge through orchestrated data-led digital journeys will become inevitable. Personalization and humanoid responses across all engagement channels will become an inevitable need. The next couple of years will be the watershed moment for AI to deliver on its promise and do it at scale. Firms like us will naturally have a head-start as we have been at this problem for a few years and have the benefit of looking at multiple client instances across geographies.”

The year 2022 has been more of a recovery from the adverse past two years. With life and businesses coming back to normal, people began to travel and explore. The advantage India had been limitations to international travel with long visa waiting periods. This resulted in travellers exploring India to its length and breadth. The hospitality sector in general has witnessed a remarkable recovery and revival. We, at ROHL, are functioning better than at pre-pandemic levels. We have seen a V- shape recovery and in some cases even over-booking across the country. On the revenue front, we witnessed a very high growth rate. In Q2, our net profits rose by 425% and sales by 85%. We expect it to grow further with the festive and wedding season around the corner.

2022 has been a mixed bag. While the optimist in me wants to see things in a positive light, it has been quite the year with many ups and downs which have had a direct impact on the one thing that humans have held dear since the dawn of time—trust. Our trust, especially in technology and our ability to use it for the greater and general good, has been severely questioned after experiencing several hacks and leaks that have pushed us to the brink of giving up.

But as they say, hope springs eternal. I believe 2023 is going to be one where trust, especially the digital variety, is going to take centre stage. With artificial intelligence, machine learning and other such technologies playing a larger role in human life, the need for trust is going to be critical like never before. Many of these technologies are not especially transparent, and even their creators are not able to look at the internal workings and see how the inputs lead to the outputs. This is going to make trust and trust-enabling frameworks important to both professionals and enterprises alike.