Jagdish Mitra, who was recently promoted to lead the enterprise businesses of Tech Mahindra from Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, is clear about where the next avenue of growth is. It includes sectors such as agri tech and oil and gas. Excerpts from his interaction with the BusinessLine:

You mentioned that agri-tech is one of your key focus, which is also one of the fastest growing sectors with many start-ups coming into this space. On the other hand Mahindra & Mahindra is one of the leaders in the sector. Would that give you an advantage?

Some of the synergies we are trying to drive with Mahindra & Mahindra include agri-tech. The technology from IoT perspective is coming from us. We have created at least four or five business propositions jointly with the parent company.

Significant investment in double digits has been made this space and we have been working on this for the past 18-24 months. Most of the roadblocks are the start-up challenges and the partner ecosystem.

However we do have the advantage of partner ecosystem from the parent company.

Can you talk about the solutions you are working on in agri-tech space?

Opportunities that lie in this space are related to farmer productivity. That’s the core area of solutions in this space.

What we are doing in this area is using enabling technologies with sensors and soil detection technology to be able to predict productivity of farms.

That is really what we have done. We have rolled out solutions both in India and overseas with fairly large companies, multinationals, in stealth mode to improve farm productivity.

What are the other focus areas? Can you elaborate on how you are going to implement this?

Areas such as agri and oil and gas are new age areas and the way to look at is the new verticals that we are continuing to invest for the future.

We are also seeing if we can scale up our smaller business verticals such as utility.

Three big areas we are focusing on and where we have made huge investments are artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and cyber security.

For example, in AI we are working with approximately 20 start-ups.

These start-ups cut across horizontals also. In cybersecurity we are working with 12 start-ups very aggressively.

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