Gen AI was a major part of a letter to shareholders from N. Chandrasekaran, chairman of India's largest IT services company, Tata Consultancy Limited, who said that AI is one of several megatrends shaping business priorities across industries around the world and that Gen AI technology will impact almost every sector in every country in the future.
“Enterprises are already investing in cloud, data infrastructure and massive processing power, which will be instrumental in AI/Gen AI. Gen AI will not only improve productivity but will also create impacts never seen or imagined before,” he wrote. Explaining TCS's efforts in the Gen AI space, the company said it has set up its AI.Cloud division in FY24 to combine its AI and cloud expertise.
“Additionally, each business group is developing domain-specific AI/GenAI products relevant to the industry value chain. Over 300,000 employees are being upskilled in GenAI technologies in FY24. TCS products and services are also being enhanced with AI capabilities,” he wrote. His bullish outlook was exemplified by TCS's recent launch of the 'WisdomNext Platform' that aims to aggregate GenAI technologies under a single platform that can accelerate innovation, expansion and development of technologies for customers.
At Infosys, Chairman Nandan M. Nilekani's shareholder address was entirely focused on Gen AI, saying that clarity about industrial uses of the technology is only emerging now that the hype has died down and the landscape has settled. But Nandan's tone seemed more measured and pragmatic. “It's also clear that there is no 'one model to rule them all' scenario,” he wrote.
While he believes the rise of powerful open source AI models is accelerating AI adoption and that GEN AI is not that different from previous generations of technology, he warns that there may be a risk of concentration in the area of hardware and cloud infrastructure as real use cases start to emerge. He currently looks at the use of AI from the perspective of how the industry will leverage it and describes the challenges: “Enterprise AI, on the other hand, requires a complete overhaul of the complex, multi-generational technologies (both legacy and modern) that reside in the enterprise. AI models themselves become commoditized. The challenge is to align the data, both structured and unstructured, explicit and implicit, within the enterprise so that AI can consume it,” he writes.
This is a unique opportunity, he said, noting that companies need to have “both an AI foundry for experimentation and an AI factory for scale-up.” Infosys has been promoting its business-facing product, Topaz, for the past few years with generational AI capabilities.
HCL Tech Chairperson Roshni Nadar Malhotra also highlighted that Generative AI (GenAI) opens new opportunities for enterprise growth and the company will be incorporating GenAI into its products. “We continue to invest aggressively to build new capabilities across our portfolio themes of digital, engineering, cloud, AI and software. A key part of this capability building is strengthening our internal R&D and innovation engine, deepening partnerships across the ecosystem and most importantly, upskilling our people, who are the biggest driver of our ability to drive digital transformation for our clients,” she wrote.