ESG goals
Indian Chief Executive Officers (CXOs) believe that the time is now to break down functional silos and work together to successfully navigate and meet the challenges of today's changing and volatile world.
This resonant sentiment has emerged as a key takeaway from Coalesce 2023, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India LLP's (DTTILLP) annual flagship initiative. At Coalesce 2023, his CXOs from 187 organizations from different business sectors participated to consider and visualize the “art of the possible” through engaging design thinking workshops. Alongside industry leaders, top-level decision makers, and alliance partners.
Romal Shetty, Chief Executive Officer, Deloitte South Asia, said: “Coalesce is the first initiative in the industry to bring together industry leaders, ecosystem providers and alliance partners under one platform to envision and design think the future. ”.
Coalesce's leaders expect to see significant business growth over the next three to five years, with the environmental, social and governance (ESG) framework playing a key role. Approximately 24% emphasize the importance of ESG in ensuring investor transparency, and 65% see ESG as a driver of growth.
As 40% of CXOs note, global executives are adopting sustainability-focused technologies like blockchain and AI to achieve net-zero goals. GenAI is also emerging as another growth driver, with 27% of CXOs exploring new business models and 41% leveraging their GenAI to enhance employee skills and competitiveness. CXOs will prioritize trusted AI frameworks and predict the competitiveness of AI, with approximately 75% of large organizations expected to see increased demand for AI specialists by 2024.
In the face of rapidly changing consumer preferences and technological innovation, Debashish Mishra, Partner and Chief Growth Officer, Deloitte South Asia, said, “No single organization can effectively tackle all challenges alone.'' Recognizing the role of India's services sector in our economy, I see first-hand how issues such as labor intensity and skills mismatch hinder productivity, but we cannot remain vibrant. When we come together in a supportive environment, synergies can generate innovative ideas and enable us to work together to address these challenges.”
Executives also emphasize the significant impact that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have on business results, pointing to the high failure rate of approximately 70 percent. This failure is often due to poor economic intuition, trust and transparency issues, and inherent risks. Traditionally, M&A efforts have been primarily overseen by CEOs and CFOs, with piecemeal involvement from other CXOs often leading to value erosion. Recognizing this challenge, there is a growing trend to add executives such as CISOs, CTOs, CMOs, COOs, CHROs, and other business leaders to the strategy phase.
As organizations navigate a complex global environment, trust is critical to long-term success. Recognizing this, 27% of CXOs support the creation of a chief trust officer role, highlighting the importance of trust in leadership. As companies move towards AI-driven operations, trust in AI systems is recognized as being just as important as the robustness of the algorithms.
A recent Deloitte study also highlighted trust as a leading AI integrator. However, while 94 percent of boards recognize the importance of trust, only 14 percent have established methods for measuring it, making trust-building strategies an urgent need.
