India’s information technology (IT) industry is estimated to be worth $125 billion as of fiscal year 2013 by trade body Nasscom, and interest in generative artificial intelligence (AI) is growing both customer and internal. Steadily rising. This growing interest has been fueled by the popularity of his ChatGPT topic on AI chatbot OpenAI, prompting companies in the space to pursue investments and proof-of-concept (PoC) projects around generative AI. increase.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services company by market value, said at its 2023 earnings press conference that customer interest in generative AI is growing rapidly.
“In our client interactions last quarter (March), the conversation started and ended with ChatGPT. Everyone is talking about what the tool can do, but innovation trumps productivity It’s very clear, it’s a pervasive trend across most of the $10 billion deals we won this quarter — machine learning is an important area for most companies, and most people asks how they are integrating ChatGPT into their products.” COO, TCS.
Subramaniam confirmed that TCS is beginning to integrate generative AI into its service portfolio. The company says it is looking to leverage nearly 40 years of data from his business, saying: We raise the bar on our own delivery capabilities and improve the overall quality of our clients. “
“This basically means much more code reusability and generative power, delivering more proven code to clients. And how clients can reuse their own code. You can also find a number of pilots running and as it matures it will be ready.We have a Center of Excellence (CoE) on Generative AI and building a core competency.Working on this has already been done,” added Subramaniam.
Infosys, the second largest company by market capitalization, also confirmed projects and initiatives around generative AI during its FY23 earnings call. Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said the company has “active projects with clients using generative AI platforms.”
“Clients are looking to use generative AI to address specific areas within their business. We look forward to creating more opportunities to work with you, and we are also improving our productivity metrics within the company.”
The CEO added that Infosys is currently working on an open-source generative AI platform as well as its own platforms such as ChatGPT. The company also uses open source algorithms and its own internal software development library as a database to train its own generative AI applications.
“We currently have active client projects focused on large-scale models to serve different disciplines within client organizations. We are trying to understand if we can create a more efficient application for them,” Parekh added.
Ahead of earnings season, fellow IT services giant Tech Mahindra announced Generative AI Studio. This is a set of solutions under his AI product from Tech Mahindra. In a media statement, the company said its platform “delivers structured and customized aspects of generative AI, enabling businesses to generate higher-quality content output than ever before.” .
In his January 17 keynote address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, C Vijaykumar, CEO of HCLTech, said the role and impact of generative AI is on the “huge industry of content creation. and customer service.” He added that tools such as ChatGPT will “create an ecosystem around itself that will drive a new era of innovation and disrupt traditional industries.”
He also added that early applications such as generative AI “need to reskill 1 billion jobs to address the skills shortage in AI,” adding that the company’s TechBee Cited platform.
Industry analysts and stakeholders say the Indian IT services industry will see a surge in generative AI initiatives to gauge customer interest.
Kumar Rakesh, Associate Director of Equity Research at brokerage firm BNP Paribas, said: As a result, contracts entered into in this regard should not be expected to be particularly large or to dramatically boost revenues. Most contracts include his PoC to see how we can leverage large-scale language models that are an integral part of generative AI. Some work has already been done on this, so the addition of new technology will be gradual. “
Rakesh added that some of the most common use cases that clients may request include interactivity in chatbot deployments and internal management information use cases. “Today, chatbots are not very interactive in nature, but ChatGPT can help solve that. Other use cases include streamlining access to instant data and charts for management teams to review. This is useful for internal use cases.”
Abhisek Mukherjee, founding partner of consulting firm Auctus Advisors, said early investments by IT services firms were either “hype investments” or focused on acquisitions. “For most companies, engagement with generative AI involves giving clients an initial platform when the query arises, and then being ready to scale the project from there,” he said. Told.
However, challenges can arise along the way. A senior industry consultant who wished to remain anonymous said the premature delivery of generative AI tools could lead to clients simply acquiring the product.
