BENGALURU: When Sam Altman, the man behind the generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) sensation and OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) CEO, visited India last week, CEOs of start-ups and experts in AI took to social media and shared their opinions on global AI revolution that is taking place at present and also the opportunities that are ahead of us.
Altman was quoted saying that generative AI is going to be the most transformative technology ever invented. AI is now put to use by small companies to top ones across different verticals. In the past few weeks alone, top and mid-tier IT companies have announced their partnerships or their own latest offering in AI and that indicates how these companies are tapping opportunities in AI as it will soon play a significant part across industries.
From TCS to Wipro, Infosys and Tech Mahindra, all IT companies are now focusing on AI. TCS’ Generative AI leverages Google Cloud’s generative AI services to design and deploy custom-tailored business solutions.
TCS has over 50,000 associates trained in AI, with plans to earn 40,000 skill badges on Google Cloud Generative AI within the year, to support anticipated demand for its new offering. Wipro has been working in the AI space for many years and for more than two years has an established Generative AI CoE, working alongside technology partners, and academic institutions driving research in advanced areas of AI to help customers leverage these technological advances to gain a competitive market edge.
“We see opportunities in improving productivity by leveraging the learning abilities of AI in the areas of call centre support and software generation. We also see a wave of AI services, such as AI model training, AI model hosting and vertical-specific data preparation, emerge in the next 5 years, which will be critical in helping enterprises capitalize on the full potential of AI,” Subha Tatavarti, Chief Technology Officer, Wipro Limited, told this newspaper.
In the long term, AI will disrupt every industry, and as a result, every business will eventually become an AI business with a specific vertical focus. Some examples of industries that will gain emergence due to GenAI include precision medicine, precision agriculture, hyper-personalised marketing. These industries will be AI-led. Other capabilities, which have been touted for a long time, will finally gain emergence due to the conversational abilities of GenAI, such as true smart buildings and smart homes, Wipro CTO explained.
Wipro is using generative AI in many areas like application development (code generation, code conversion, test data generation), knowledge-intensive processes like creating content for marketing and knowledge assistants and quality processes to capture service assurance and productivity data to publish initial benchmarks.“The models being used in these processes are ones that are already available for enterprise use with enterprise-grade security,” Tatavarti added.
Infosys recently launched its AI-first offering Topaz. Talking about market opportunities of generative AI, Balakrishna D R, Executive VP- Global Head, AI and Automation and ECS, Infosys said, generative AI technology is evolving at an accelerated rate and new use cases are coming to market and new ecosystems are slowly being built around it. There are innumerable possibilities and opportunities in all industries.
One of the important challenges is regulating AI. Balakrishna says, “In the context of generative AI, there are multiple concerns like IP, privacy violations, toxicity, hallucination, AI security, etc. Infosys has built technical and policy-driven guardrails, along with our partner ecosystem for ensuring fair, explainable, and secure AI systems.”
When asked about the AI revolution, CP Gurnani, MD & CEO, Tech Mahindra, said, “Today enterprises seeking digital acceleration deem AI as sacrosanct. Not only does it empower organisations to reimagine everyday operations, but it also helps them future-proof them. So far, AI has demonstrated its ability to predict, detect, recommend, and observe. However, with Generative AI which enables creation mechanism, the market has been truly disrupted.”
Tech Mahindra started working on generative AI around 2015-16 with one of its first IP created in the media domain called Storicool.“An auto content creation platform, it was beyond its years. Since then, we have launched a suite of AI offerings for enterprises to help them in their digital acceleration journeys,” Gurnani said.
Does generative AI revolution pose risks to IT services?
With the help of generative AI and other capabilities, text, code and images can be automatically generated. Recently, Kotak Institutional Equities in its report said, “Key risk for IT services is the deflationary impact arising from productivity increases driven by generative AI not being compensated by an increase in volumes in this transition period.”
It believes that mid-tier firms are more vulnerable than large companies due to the former’s higher exposure to application development. It also estimates 33% jump in developer productivity through generative AI adoption.
When asked about risks to IT services, Peter Bendor- Samuel, CEO of Everest Group, a research firm, told this newspaper, “We have looked at the impact of AI on service firms and specifically those based in India, we believe the coming AI revolution will be a significant driver of growth and profits.” He said AI will act as a productivity boost to application development and maintenance. However, that productivity will unlock higher wages, and profits and lower the price of services further stimulating demand which is already well beyond the industries’ ability to meet.
The Indian service industry will have to change and adapt to this new dynamic but it has shown that it is more than capable of these kinds of changes as demonstrated by its quick adoption of digital transformation.
“The smaller firms are often nimbler than the larger firms and, in most cases, will move more quickly. This is a paradigm shift not a scale play hence any firm which is willing to adopt the shift should come out as a winner. There is going to be more than enough work to meet everyone’s hopes and dreams if they can adapt,” he said. And for those who can’t or won’t adapt, the future is bleak and they are likely to be left behind. However, the good news for India is that the captains of these firms are very aggressive and open to change, the CEO of the research firm said.