As India navigates its way through the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the county has relied on the use of technology to help keep growth engines moving- be it work from home, e-commerce, digital payments, and even entertainment.

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Digitisation has led to changes in consumer behaviour and opened up opportunities to service under-served or un-served markets, improve supply chain efficiencies, bring in economies of scale and cut down on costs.

All of this has been made possible because of the changes brought in over the past decade with the digital infrastructure being built out, a massive reduction in data prices and a jump in the adoption of smartphones.

According to reports, India is likely to have 900 million active users by 2025, with internet penetration at 45 percent as of January of 2021. India is home to the third-largest online shopper base of 140 million, only behind China and the US. The e-retail market is expected to grow to $120-140 billion by FY26, increasing at approximately 25-30 percent annually over the next five years, according to Bain-Flipkart report of 2021.

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UPI transactions hit a record high of 3.24 billion monthly transactions in July this year, with the last billion transactions being logged in just 10 months driven by the pandemic.

E-governance in India has steadily evolved from computerisation of government departments to mega missions like Aadhaar, GST and now the CoWin platform. So what will digitisation mean for Corporate India and the economy?

In an interview with CNBC-TV18's Shereen Bhan, Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson and CEO of Salesforce India said, post the pandemic digital transformation is imperative for every single CEO. She highlighted that work from anywhere, being able to perform from anywhere, is something that is driving most of the companies in India today.

"Earlier the digital transformation imperative was there in about 30 percent of CEOs. But today, the digital transformation imperative is there across the board for every single CEO as he has two things in mind - how are we going to have an omni channel way of not only connecting with the customer but also with all other stakeholders including employees, supply chain, dealerships etc. So the requirement for being able to work from anywhere, being able to perform from anywhere, all of this is something that is driving most of the companies in India today."

Also read: The potential of digitization in rural India – A case for women entrepreneurship amidst COVID-19

Sanjeev Sharma, managing director of ABB India said most of their clients rapidly adapted to remote systems to ensure reliability. "Most of our customers in the industrial and infrastructure plays have to service public or they have to service their customers. So reliability, availability, maintainability and serviceability are the important aspects. The first thing during the pandemic we experienced is that the customers were willing to change their expected behaviour and wanted the services to be delivered remotely. So, we saw a rapid adaptation of remote services to keep the reliability and availability of infrastructure in industrial complexes."

Piyush Singh, senior managing director at Accenture highlighted that India could potentially unlock $1 trillion of value via the digital route, "We are still at the very start of unlocking the value from digital. The total value unlocks that we estimate for the Indian economy for digital adoption is at $1 trillion. However, this unlock will require multiple things to work in sync."

Watch video for entire discussion.