By the time you have finished reading this sentence, the universe has expanded by 4,000 km, the earth has traveled 1,800 km in space and 2,40,000 stars have been born. At the same time, 2.3 million Google searches have been hit, 150 million emails have been sent and Apple has generated $70,000 in revenue. Pretty amazing right?

What is truly incredible is the lightning speed at which technology and markets are moving today, dismantling established business models and giving birth to entire new industries.

In essence, an enterprise is very much akin to a breathing organism, pulsing with life and striving to adapt and evolve to survive. But the intensity of industry disruption and rate-of-change of consumer needs today necessitates staying one step ahead of market demand. In this pervasive digital era, not the fittest, but the most dexterous and visionary will thrive.

At Infosys Consulting, we are enabling some of the world’s leading organizations to transform into Live Enterprises of their own, entwined in a symbiotic relationship with their customers through the power of machine learning, big data and predictive analytics. Not only are we exploring the vistas of new and disruptive business models for discrete manufacturers, financial service providers, retailers and telcos but we are also sowing the seeds of the future in places as far away as the farm, trailblazing from the ground up.

Some of our passionate pathfinders are creating cutting-edge innovations for a leading agri-business manufacturer to move them into the agile dimension. The vision is to help them connect with their customers in real time through a major digitization program that will reinvent the firm from the inside out. Other ideas include using AI to detect crop diseases and deploying ground-breaking drone technology to overcome the growing limitations of natural pollination by bees and designing cloud-based driverless tractors for crop farmers.

As the trusted advisor to many other Fortune 500 companies, we recognize that to achieve digital transformation at scale is well beyond any playbook or boardroom directive. We believe, at the core of every client journey, must be the life force of agility – this is really the only elixir that will fuel their ignition forward.

Every day we internalize the spirit of the Live Enterprise in its purest sense, which helps us power our clients forward with their lofty ambitions to reinvent at scale in today’s age of digital disruption.

Think of the simple act of sipping a cup of tea. There’s so much data being processed, and corresponding decisions being taken, in that very moment. Data that tells you how not to burn your tongue. How not to tip the cup. How the tea needs another lump of sugar to taste just right. And when the cup goes cold, because you were on the phone unexpectedly, that it’s time to fix yourself a fresh one. Sensing, processing information – from past experience and in real time, making decisions, changing them and then responding comes naturally to living organisms. In many ways an agile startup is no different in the way it responds to market changes and opportunities to innovate. Which brings us to the question of the large incumbent enterprise.

What will it take for companies with complex legacy landscapes to quickly sense changing business needs and continuously evolve in response? As several of them embark on the digital transformation journey, the opportunity to transform into agile, responsive beings, at enterprise scale, is a compelling one. The opportunity to be a Live Enterprise.

Our vision for Infosys as a Live Enterprise is to position our employees at the sensing-feeling-responding core of the company, with the ability to seamlessly interact with and continuously learn from our client and partner ecosystems. Each one of these interactions, with the associated intelligence, is recorded and linked in real time, through the Infosys Knowledge Graph, to drive better experience, pan-enterprise visibility and operational efficiency. This then feeds into the Infosys Digital Brain to systematically create organizational sentience that makes every interaction value-adding while simultaneously eliminating non-productive work. To realize this vision, we are reimagining our employee experience, our core business processes, and all our enabling IT systems and infrastructure.

This means focusing on personal productivity, nurturing zero-latency in processes, ensuring just-in-time data for decision-making, driving hyper-productivity and facilitating continuous learning to instill new patterns of sentient behavior. Our IT transformation is powered by the Infosys Digital Platform, based on next-generation, cloud-native, internet-scale architecture and engineered using open source software, commodity hardware and no-lockin architecture through distributed agile delivery. The initial releases of our learning (Lex) and personal productivity (InfyMe) apps, delivered on this platform, have seen record-breaking downloads of over 2,00,000 and 1,20,000 respectively. As we start this proverbial journey of a thousand miles, we know we are purposefully navigating our next.