India, a global hub for back-office services, has more than 5 million people engaged in IT and business process outsourcing, according to industry body Nasscom.
TCS, a division of India's Tata conglomerate, works with multinational companies to develop IT systems, has more than 600,000 employees and annual sales of approximately $30 billion (approx. billion dollars).
The company reported that its pipeline of generative AI projects doubled quarter-over-quarter and was worth $900 million by the end of March.
Kritivasan said he expects flows to “increase significantly” and continue to nearly double for several more quarters. The results so far include record orders worth $42.7 billion for the fiscal year ending in March, reported this month.
But Kritivasan warned that claims about the immediate impact of generative AI are overstated. “We're at a stage where we're getting into the hype where we're overestimating the benefits,” he said. “The impact will be seen in the longer term than we would expect to see an effect over the next two to three quarters.”
He disputed whether generative AI would lead to an overall reduction in employment, saying, “The world is going to need more, not less, in terms of technical talent. “We have a huge number of human resources,” he said.
The country needs more workforce training to capitalize on this demand for technology talent, he added. Many business leaders say the majority of India's graduates lack sufficient skills to be employable, amid concerns over the quality of many higher education institutions.
Nasscom has previously estimated that less than 20% of the 1.5 million Indian engineering students who graduate each year find employment in industry.
Kritivasan said TCS, which runs its own extensive in-house AI upskilling program, only hires directly from around 10-15 per cent of Indian universities, with the rest being “employable”. said further efforts were needed.
“If we could probably get 50 percent of them into college, we would be able to provide more jobs and, more importantly, be able to meet the technological demands that we're going to have across industries around the world,” he said. Ta.
Regarding overall IT service spending by customers, Kritivasan said inflation, wars and upcoming elections have increased “uncertainty”, causing companies in major markets to postpone investing in new technology projects. said. TCS' currency-adjusted annual revenue growth rate fell to 3.4% from 13.7% in the previous year.
Salil Parekh, chief executive of rival Indian IT services company Infosys, said customer discretionary spending was “slowing down” after the company reported flat annual revenue growth last week.
“We see this situation continuing,” Parekh added, adding that Infosys expects revenue growth to slow to 1-3% in the next financial year on a constant currency basis.
financial times
