That Digital Show

In this episode, Jay and Theo chat with Arjun Gupta, Senior Software Engineer at Josh Talks, to learn about the company's mission to empower the youth of India, with relatable role models and e-learning. The media platform targets young people in smaller towns across India with content in ten vernacular languages. Arjun likens Josh Talks to an elder brother, guiding users through critical life decisions and mentoring them to improve their lives. Josh Talk's ten YouTube channels currently have 14 million subscribers, with videos garnering about 70 million views each month. The success of Josh Talks led to the launch of an e-learning application, Josh Skills, to upskill young people and better-equip them to find employment. The flagship course is Spoken English, as this remains a common reason employers reject job applicants. A popular feature of Josh Skills is P2P, a peer to peer service allowing users to click a button to talk to friends within the Josh community, practicing their spoken English skills. To improve completion rates, Arjun shares how his team is currently working on ways to gamify the learning process, with subscribers competing in trivia contests to climb the leaderboard. But interactive features like this don't come without technical challenges, which is where Google Cloud can help. To make game play within the app as real-time as possible, Josh Talks will scale its servers to handle the increased load with minimum latency. Josh Talks long-term vision is to support subscribers from school age (14-15) until they are settled into their careers (30-35), which is why Josh Talks is building an infrastructure capable of supporting multiple tools and products so it can grow alongside them.

In this episode, Jay and Theo are joined by Manav Doshi, GM of Technology Solutions and Keith Junius, Enterprise Architect, both of Equifax Australia, to talk about the organization's ambitious cloud transformation. As a global credit bureau and data analytics company, Equifax is helping financial institutions, companies, and government agencies make critical financial decisions. In 2017, a critical event triggered a complete rethink of its security in all 24 locations. Equifax Australia embarked on a AUD2 billion journey with Google Cloud to migrate 100% of its key platforms and credit bureaus into the cloud. Manav shares how, prior to 2017, Equifax AU had previously believed its data was safer in private data centers. However, maintaining a high level of security requires a lot of investment. Equifax AU realized that the maturity of cloud platforms, particularly Google Cloud, has progressed beyond what it could achieve on prem. The cloud allows Equifax AU to respond far more nimbly to critical security events, with much of the security work taken care of by the platform. Meanwhile, by adopting a CI/CD methodology the company can roll out security changes and new features quickly and iteratively with push-button deployment. Improvements to a product can now be made and deployed within minutes. Keith ends with how Equifax AU is treating the move as a global business transformation, pairing technology with the right human skills. Equifax wants its people to be curious enough to seek out and play with new things, focussing on a growth mindset and a passion to learn, along with a willingness to collaborate.

In this episode, we speak to Pak Kaspar, CEO of Bank Raya, and Pak Gibbon, EVP of Technology System Information, Bank Raya, who share in more detail how Bank Raya is disrupting themselves first internally, to meet the challenges of tomorrow. As one of the largest and most distributed banks in Southeast Asia, Bank Raya (previously known as Bank Rakyat Indonesia Agroniaga (AGRO)) has been on a digital and cultural transformation journey since 2016. Working closely with Google Cloud, the bank has managed to modernize their infrastructure to increase security and scalability, helping them enable the capabilities to build out a digital bank. Pak Kaspar talks about 'Super Raya' and how the bank has two main goals - the first is to capture new types of customers, and the second is to create tailored products for specific problem solving. It is looking to push innovation forwards within their product development, with eyes on the metaverse future. Bank Raya has been investing in their people for many years, ensuring that they have the right talent in place to help scale up at speed. By putting people and security first, with the best practices in place, they stay true to their PPT core - people, process and technology. With strong foundations already in place, Bank Raya is able to customise parts of the business with new applications and offerings, to meet the changing demands of customers.

Singtel is a household name in Singapore as the leading telecommunications company. But did you know it serves more than 744 million customers across 21 countries, including Australia, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines? This 143-year-old established telco doesn't look any bit its age, as over the years, it has continuously evolved and reinvented the way it does business to keep up with changing times. Google Cloud accelerates every organization's ability to transform through data-powered innovation with the best infrastructure, platform, industry solutions, and expertise for digital transformation. In today's episode, we are joined by Manoj Prasanna Kumar, the Head of Technology leading 5G and Internet of Things innovations at Singtel, to discuss Singtel's rich history, the drive for reliable connectivity, and their continuous focus on innovating for the future.

Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and Google Cloud recently announced a new strategic partnership to accelerate digital transformation across consumer and enterprise segments in Indonesia. Part of their efforts includes digitally transforming Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison's operations ‒ To continue on its path to innovation and build a cloud-first organization, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison will modernize its infrastructure and applications on Google Cloud. In particular, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and Google Cloud will define a clear roadmap for advanced data analytics modernization and AI/ML adoption that will not only enable the telecommunications leader to improve its core operations, costs, and customer experiences, but also help the company advance its position in the telecommunications ecosystem and enable it to identify and maximize new business model opportunities in future. In this episode, we continue our conversation with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, featuring Bayu Hanantasena, Chief Business Officer, to dive deeper into their innovation and transformation journey and how they are building a cloud-first organization to improve their core operations.

Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and Google Cloud recently announced a new strategic partnership to accelerate digital transformation across consumer and enterprise segments in Indonesia. Strongly aligned to the Indonesian government's digital economy development program goals, the multi-faceted partnership will serve Indonesia's SMBs as a priority target segment and spans many areas that are core to the capabilities of both organizations. The pillars of the strategic partnership will see the two organizations working jointly to; Digitally transform Indonesia's SMBs across their business lifecycles, Digitally transform enterprises and communities with the power of 5G, and Digitally transform Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison's own operations. In this episode, we are joined by Vikram Sinha, President Direct and CEO at Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and Rob Enslin, President, Cloud Sales at Google to dive into the strategic partnershp and learn more about the three pillars of digital transformation and the impact they will have on Indonesia.

Jitesh of Federal Bank and John of Riafy join your hosts this week to chat about what it takes to build and maintain a specialized digital banking representative. John starts the show with a history of Riafy, including how he and his co-founders chose this magically-inspired name. Jitesh walks us through Federal Bank's journey to a digitization strategy that started in 1996. With an eye for the future, the bank adopted mobile banking early on, supporting this feature along with international banking and more for 20 plus years. In 2016, Federal Bank started a campaign of research and development to strategize the continuing build-out of digital and mobile banking offerings. These efforts paid off, and now 88% of customer interactions occur in mobile or digital banking. Jitesh details the individual projects that make up their robust digital presence, like their revolutionary mobile banking signup that makes getting started easy. With the help of Riafy, Federal Bank has implemented beneficial tools like Feddy, the AI chat agent who offers 24/7 assistance to online customers. John and Jitesh tell us how Feddy was created to be not only helpful but friendly, acting as a mascot for the bank. We learn how Feddy was engineered, including the planning process for building the AI and how John and his team designed Feddy's training program. With the help of Google solutions like Dialogflow, the team created Feddy quickly and efficiently with a likable personality all his own. Overcoming initial consumer reservations, Federal Bank chose a slow rollout for Feddy. Through research into customer behaviors, Federal Bank planned to start small, keeping him external, and slowly introducing him to more banking areas as customer trust developed. In the future, Riafy and Federal Bank will continue to grow Feddy and foster a trusting relationship between Feddy and customers through advanced conversation, context principles, and more. John and Jitesh offer advice to other companies looking to incorporate AI into their digital platform.

This week, the APAC Podcast welcomes Ram Radhakrishnan, the Head of Analytics, Loyalty, and Customer Data at Woolworths. He starts the show with a brief history of Woolworths' online presence, including how WooliesX was introduced to leverage modern technologies and facilitate a smooth online grocery shopping experience. As the company evolved, leadership had to grow and adapt. The startup culture of WooliesX enables an innovative, future-thinking environment that gives employees autonomy in learning things like AI to solve problems. Understanding customers is vital to improving the online shopping experience, so data collected from rewards programs are essential metrics. Ram describes how this data is collected, analyzed, and used to meet high customer expectations. For example, in the app, personalized lists make it easy for customers to select their everyday items quickly. Google Cloud's myriad capabilities have fostered the digital growth of WooliesX. Ram details the Cloud Platform tools used by the company and how Google's commitment to innovation means new, valuable features are continually released. We hear about the structure of WooliesX and how the practices and tribes in the company are supported to foster continued learning and growth. Ram closes the show with a look into the future of WooliesX and retail in general. He talks about the challenges and exciting advancements in analytics he anticipates in areas like robotics and AI.

Cloud FinOps is an operational framework and cultural shift that brings technology, finance, and business together to drive financial accountability and accelerate business value realization. Today, Chris Hood is joined by Eric Lam, Bruce Warner and Pathik Sharma to discuss an actionable set of steps that will help your organization implement FinOps and maximize your cloud investment on Google Cloud.

Jay and Theo are back this week hosting Tony and Tars from Taiwanese company Mlytics. Mlytics strives for a faster, safer internet through cloud-disrupting solutions. Our guests talk about the origins of Mlytics, and how the company closely monitors, refines, and analyzes a plethora of data as part of their AI solution for customers. This system revolutionizes the Content Delivery Network, working faster through caching and compression and safer by protecting the networks from attack. After studying the CDN market, the CEO of Mlytics realized the powerful solutions available, while technically impressive, were not end-user friendly. With Mlytics, he sought to change the space by working backwards and beginning with a detailed picture of customer needs, then building solutions to satisfy them. Mlytics clients are provided with easy access to multiple CDNs quickly and safely to offer ultimate control and tailoring to their particular goals. By building this ecosystem of choice, Mlytics has created a one-of-a-kind brand that enables clients to choose the tools that work best for their company. With standardized CDN usage, clients know they're using the best networks and paying for only what they use in a centralized billing platform. AI is a big part of this Mlytics Smart Load Balancer solution. Through machine learning techniques, Mlytics analyzes data to find patterns in CDN infrastructure and reactions. They've built in a 15 second performance prediction based on this information, allowing them to predict CDN downtime and automatically move client projects to more efficient networks when necessary. The company's ethos of full transparency has fostered a supportive and collaborative work environment as well. Our guests offer advice for other tech companies looking to exceed customer expectations and empower employees to experiment and innovate.