The Tata Ethics Conclave 2023 was held at Taj President, Mumbai on February 14, 2023 and its theme was ‘Ethics in the Era of Emerging Technologies and Digitalisation’.The conclave was attended in-person by senior Tata leaders and 160+ Tata Group ethics community members, additionally 250+ participants joined virtually.
The conclave started with the group CEO, S. Padmanabhan providing an update on the ethics journey during FY23. This was followed by Ethics Torch Bearer recognitions bestowed upon six ethics community members and presentation of trophies to the winning and three finalist teams of the second edition of Ethics in Action case study competition by the Tata Group Chairman, N Chandrasekaran. Team Transparency Defenders from TCS Latin America won the case study competition, other three finalist teams were team I-PURE from Tata Uganda, Team GUSTO from Tata Chemicals and Team Curious Conquerors from Tata Play. Six ethics community members - Haresh T. Gangaramani, Tata Chemicals, Kedar N. Deshpande, Tata Housing Development Company, Sachin Gupta, Tata Power Delhi Distribution, Dominic V Fernandes, Tata Capital, N. Shanthi, Titan Company and Shalini Sulakshana, Tata Steel were recognized as the Ethics Torch Bearers for FY22.
The Tata Group Chairman, Mr. Chandrasekaran, addressed the conclave and shared his thoughts on the theme of the conclave and importance of digital and emerging technologies for the Tata Group companies. The first plenary session on Digital Ethics and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence was delivered by Vishal Jain, partner, Risk Advisory, Deloitte India. Vishal provided interesting insights on the requirement of defining the boundaries of digital ethics and highlighted key areas of concern and challenges. The second plenary session was addressed by Sandeep Alur, Director, Microsoft Technology Center who shared thought-provoking perspectives on owning the responsibilities and efficiently managing the ethical concerns arising from the use of emerging technologies.
The second half of the conclave started with panel discussion on the topic Combating digital misinformation: Reimagining social media and digital strategies. The panel discussion was moderated by Sreelakshmi Hariharan, Business Head - Diagnostics and head - Brand Marketing, Tata 1mg and the panel members included Poornima Sampath, Senior VP and chief legal officer, Tata Digital, Abonty Banerjee, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer, Tata Capital, and Deepa Krishnan, director - Marketing, Category, Loyalty and Digital, Tata Starbucks Private. Next was a symposium session on managing data privacy risks for value creation, conducted by Arun Prabhu, partner (head - TMT), Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and Delizia Diaz, Group privacy compliance director, Jaguar Land Rover.
Six additional Ethics Community members were given Certificate of Recognition for their significant contribution towards driving Leadership of Business Ethics framework by Mr. Padmanabhan. The six individuals are Dr. Alokananda Ray, Tata Steel, Dr. Sajiv Madhavan, Tata Elxsi, Janhavi Malhotra, IHCL, Indraneel Sarkar, TRF, Manick Sharma, Tata Play and Varun Ghai, Tata AIA Life Insurance Company.
The last session of the conclave was another lively panel discussion on the topic leveraging digital to drive ethical culture in the organisation, which was moderated by Jagdeep Singh, partner, EY and had Prabha Thomas, chief risk and compliance officer, Tata Consultancy Services, Vinod Bhat, chief information officer and chief ethics counsellor, Tata SIA Airlines, and Sudhansu Misra, chief human resource officer, Infiniti Retail as panel members.
The recordings of the sessions are available on Tata Tomorrow University, click here to watch.
