During a visit to India earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella looked at how the country's information technology (IT) companies are advancing and customizing artificial intelligence (AI) for use. He talked about what he was doing.
Nadella said the first companies to deploy Copilot, Microsoft's AI-based conversational chat interface, to their customers and their companies included Infosys, HCLTech and LTIMindtree.
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Given that Indian IT companies are deploying AI and generative AI (GenAI) to hundreds and thousands of global enterprises, how they do it for themselves matters.
Mohammed Rafee Tarafdar, chief technology officer (CTO) at Infosys, said the company is leveraging AI to “reimagine work, the workplace, and the workforce” and use technology to expand human potential. He said he is focusing on
“Over the past 12 months, we have continued to adopt and deploy AI within key processes. We have rolled out the knowledge assistant InfyMe NAVI for all (company) leaders to help increase productivity in the sales process,” Tarafdar said. states.
modernization tools
Infosys uses AI assistants to aid productivity in software engineering, modernization, and migration. Tarafdar said the impact of these assistants is clear. “Using the Assistant, a developer generated his 3 million lines of meaningful code. By using traditional AI and his GenAI, some processes that previously took weeks It can now be completed in a few days.”
Like our customers, companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro, IBM, and LTIMindtree are implementing AI across processes such as human resources (HR) management, IT infrastructure automation, and even sales.
“Through our early work applying foundational models, we found that time to value is up to 70% faster than traditional AI approaches. We are leveraging the transformative power of generative AI. Doing this not only helps us test and validate what we create, but also helps us build use cases that our clients can reproduce and benefit from. ,” said Geeta Gurnani, IBM Technology CTO and technical sales leader for India and South Asia.
IBM introduced a conversational AI-powered platform called AskHR, allowing 94% of employee interactions to occur without human interaction. The platform covers approximately 79 different systems, 4,700 policy documents, and supports 2,500 processes. This allows the HR team to focus on “value-creating tasks.”
Gurnani says, “We use AI to automate the tedious task of sifting through data such as past performance reviews, skills, whether an employee has received up-to-date training, and length of service. ” For example, it takes managers, on average, about eight hours to gather the data needed for a promotion and fill out the relevant recommendation forms. During a pilot in the second quarter of 2022, approximately 1,800 managers in our North American consulting team used HiRo (a digital tool) to complete data collection and entry tasks in approximately one hour each to support the promotional process for that quarter. In total, we saved approximately 12,000 hours. ”
Sivaraman Ganesan, head of AI.Cloud at TCS, said getting employees to understand GenAI is a big challenge. “One of the things that has been very busy for us in the last few quarters has been to not only train our employees on the capabilities of GenAI, but also familiarize them with the technology,” he said.
Adopting GenAI means different teams within your company will be trained together. TCS recently announced that it has trained 300,000 employees in basic AI skills.
Bangalore-based Wipro has several initiatives underway to apply GenAI to hundreds of internal scenarios across HR, sales and marketing. Anup Purohit, Wipro's chief information officer, said AI will speed up pre-sales and allow executives to focus on core sales by interacting with customers and understanding their problems. Stated.
He said Wipro is introducing an AI-powered talent marketplace, which will help its employees enhance their skills and plan their careers.
Support for productivity improvement
Wipro has introduced an AI-powered enterprise chatbot that handles business queries, automates tasks, provides information, and provides support to employees. “Currently used by employees in 53 countries to improve employee search experiences, knowledge management, and increase productivity with proactive engagement notifications for important activities like approvals and onboarding. Significantly reduced service delivery costs by directing common employee interactions and resolutions to electronic virtual assistance, freeing up employee capacity and reducing navigation to legacy apps. Around 85 per cent of this will be handled by this chatbot,” said Purohit. The chatbot typically responds to employees within 5 seconds and processes over 14,000 queries each day with 95% accuracy.
According to a Microsoft study last year, GenAI benefits not only individuals but also entire organizations. Approximately 70% of Copilot users say their productivity has improved, and 68% say their work quality has improved.
Business Standard's CIO and CTO agreed that the only way to participate in the AI transition is through training and upskilling. Purohit, the Wipro executive, believes companies need to invest in AI model training for their employees, ethical use, systems integration, and blending technical skills with critical thinking.
“We have designed and implemented various training programs, including GenAI101 training, with the aim of teaching all our employees the fundamentals of AI. Wipro has trained over 220,000 employees. Of these, 195,000 people have been trained in GenAI basics, 18,000 at basic level, 4,000 at junior level and 2,200 at advanced level,'' Purohit said.
LTIMindtree has developed an internal microsite called GARUDA that provides training materials on various topics in GenAI. Through his internal platform, Shoshin, the company trains his 18,000+ employees on the fundamentals of his GenAI.
