Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript has been generated using automated tools and reviewed by a human. However, some errors may still be present. For complete accuracy, please refer to the original audio.
00:00:05 Debjani Ghosh: I do believe that AI needs India because one of the biggest problems with AI, I mean, given the kind of investment that has gone in the voices questioning returns is gonna get louder, and justifiably so, right? This is where the world has to start thinking about to get the kind of returns that is needed to justify the investment that's going into building a We have to drive population, scale, deployment. That's the only way you can get these kind of returns. I think India is one country that has figured out how to practice. This is Nasscom Conversations hosted by Govind Ethiraj.
00:00:52 Govind Ethiraj: Hello and welcome to Nasscom Conversations. The big question today is how do we skill the next billion plus people in the age of artificial intelligence? There are a lot of things that companies and individuals can do, educational and training initiatives necessary to prepare a billion people for a future AI driven economy. The question that you could ask as an individual is, are core tech courses and foundational skills still relevant for students or educational institutions who need to adopt A newer and more balanced approach to skilling future generations? So let's look at it from a company's point of view and a particularly large one at that. I'm joined today by Sanjeev Jain, member of the Wipro Executive Board and Chief Operating Officer. Based in Bangalore, Sanjeev is responsible for improving organizational and operational efficiency to drive sustainable, profitable and delivery led growth with client centricity. At Wipro, he also leads the functions of global business operations, delivery excellence, IT, information security and enterprise risk management. He's worked for over 30 years in leading large diverse teams and scaling up global capability centres, deploying Lean Six Sigma and business transformation. So let's talk about Wipro and how is Wipro equipping it's employees and keeping up with the disruption artificial intelligence is causing in the technology landscape.
00:02:10 Sanjeev Jain: Out of the 240,000 employees that we have in Widbrook globally, 230,000 have already completed what we call Gen. AI one O 1. And what one O 1 does is creates an awareness to every employee on not only AI, but we believe that the responsible usage of AI is a very important component of AI. So we have all gone through it including our senior management, including our some of our board members that is one second is having done the 230,000 Gen. AI one O 1, we started launching advanced learning pathways. It's natural curiosity for human being. Our employees started asking after one O 1, where is my 201-3014 O 1? So we now had about 44,000 of our employees who are in advanced AI certified category. That has been a significant achievement for us. And as we went through it, you'll understand go is it's not one-size-fits-all. You have to get into persona based certifications. When I say persona based, if you are in sales, if you are in a healthcare industry, if you are in a financial services. So we created almost 40 plus persona based learning pathways, OK, so that we have folks on domain knowledge and relevant AI infusion in that to do this. How did we go about it, right? Step one, we created an AI Academy, right? We need an AI Academy internally to Wipro who actually could curate the content, launch this learning pathways and then get this training cascaded to all our employees. It has been on a e-learning module. We also partnered with lot of our hyperscale of partners. We have strong partnerships with Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon, NVIDIA. So we actually work as a ecosystem, leverage each other's learning modules and that helped us bring it to life. In addition, what we have done and this is all learning, OK, as we go around, we learn every time. So a lot of our employees also wanted to do much more deeper learning and certifications. So we have tied up with Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and that's a very unique program where actually we have an online masters in AI and data science. So that means Wipro employees will be assessed by Iisc. There is no dilution of standards. They will go to the same aptitude, the same knowledge assessment that they would do for any other candidate they take. And then Wipro will enable flexible work integrated learning program with IIC over a period of two to three years where our employees will graduate, the undergraduates will enroll and graduate as masters. So I think to be these are multiple things we have done. I would say we are still learning what more to do.
00:04:52 Govind Ethiraj: So companies like Wipro are obviously rolling out workshops, programs and courses which are aimed at their employees and upskilling them and reskilling them. But what are the learning outcomes? Who are the people who are being addressed across the spectrum and how do they receive this training differently if they do? And how are AI tools themselves being used to optimise learning and processes?
00:05:15 Sanjeev Jain: So as we evolve in this, we are talking to our clients, we are talking to our partners, we are understanding where our clients are going. There are clients who would like us to do some use cases, for example, in financial services, in fraud detection as an example, right, Someone in healthcare may want us to do something on claims processing within our own company. If I take Wipro as Client 0 for ourselves in my own company, I would like my HR function to really, you know, use AI for real time employee touch processes. We may want to standardize or automate job description creation, background verification. We may want to have our sales team to have content creation, which is very personalized to our clients. It will want to have help desk, right? Why do I need an agent in help desk? My level 1 support could be done out of. So these are ideas that are actually coming from our employees as well as they're getting trained. There's a huge ecosystem where the ideas are pouring in and we are able to do that. And the way we have defined AI now we have a little more Charper focus COVID, as I was saying, AI is 3 components for us. It's all about mindset, skill set and tool set. OK, when I say mindset, that's what I spoke about. Where can I apply mindset? Which industry, which function? So it has to be constantly on the back of our mind. Do I need a human to do this? Or can I augment a human to do it better with AI, Right. Something like in a flight, we have a copilot. So we similarly we kind of add a copilot to your job, make it efficient plus innovation, right? Human has to do innovation. The repetitive tasks is efficiency. So combine the power of the two. That's about mindset when it comes to skill set. I spoke about all the certifications, all the learning paths, learning journey. There is a, there is a plethora of learning paths we have now and I am sure it will evolve based on what we see in the marketplace. Third is on the tool set, which is very important in my mind. When I said tool set, what are the tools I can give to our associates? For example, Microsoft has this GitHub copilot, Google has code assist, Amazon has code Whisperer, right? There are many and more AI tools that are emerging in the market. Open AI has bunch of tools. So basically we are really encouraging the use of the tools. So the combination of mindset, skill set and the tool set comes together to really have, you know, people at Playground to play with, do proof of concept, working with the clients, working with partners. I think that's how we see the evolving ecosystem of this.
00:07:44 Govind Ethiraj: So looking from the outside and then into the inside, how is Wipro, for example, incorporated AI into its own systems? And this is very important because herein lie the lessons for other companies as well, whether you're in IT or not in IT, because it's also weird in some ways. AI rubber meets the AI road. And let's understand how Wipro is using AI to map out additionally learning parts for its talent and what are the benefits that arise out of that.
00:08:11 Sanjeev Jain: When we work with clients, there's a lot of partnership and collaboration required because many times we are working on the client systems, client platform. It could be wealth management, it could be on retail in the product catalog management, pricing. When you spoke about manufacturing with our predictive maintenance, it could be supply chain planning, right? So there are many, many use cases that we are coming across. Now coming to to me, I come back to Wipro as a client 0 because for us that is in our control, right? So we have many live cases today. So for example, Govind, if I want my pay slip today on the system, I just I have a chat bot. I just say pay slip for this month. It just mails it to me. If I want to process my leave, I have a chat bot who does it. Earlier I would have had to go somewhere, login, download or send an e-mail to someone. So there was many use cases where our expense processing, right, all the travel reports expenses, all our leaves processing, all our queries with HR queries with IT help desk, I think have actually gone live. We are actually seeing real benefits of these cases in production today. So it is real here and now that's very important because people have to feel the power of AI going live. It's not just a theory anymore. And once they know, I think they are getting more advanced now into, you know, getting structured data and unstructured data together. For example, let me tell you, we have now embarked on a talent marketplace. Having such a large company 240,000 you can imagine, we want to make sure we are in my mind Uberizing our talent marketplace. What do I mean by Uberizing our talent marketplace? There are a set of jobs demands that come and there are our employees. So I have to marry both, right? So what we have done is we have asked each one of our employees to update their profiles. Once you update your profile, you can be matched to the next job that you want and you can define your career aspiration. You could say that Govind is here today, Govind wants to be there tomorrow. And the AI engine will actually match based on your current profile and current skills, the desired skills. It will give you a learning path and then you follow the learning path and you apply for that job and then once you're selected, you can move. So these are to be examples People are seeing that it's helping them in their career aspirations. It's helping them drive them to a learning path which they would have been blindsided. Even today, our kids ask after 10th what to do, after 12th what to do after engineering, what to do. So we're trying to fix that gap to actually help people define their career ambition and enable them through various programs that we have to meet their career aspirations.
00:10:52 Govind Ethiraj: And then the inevitable question, if AI is replacing and eliminating some kinds of job roles, what happens to those employees and how do companies plan ahead? How do companies structure their organisations going forward, knowing that these organisations or their organisations will not be the same, or at least will not be what they were earlier?
00:11:13 Sanjeev Jain: So I would say that the structure, when I say structure, we would have added some AI specific practices for technology, we would have added more AI talent OR we would have up skilled more talent. Yes, there have been reduction in some of the roles which were more repetitive, which were more into say code testing, maintenance, call centres and one. So, but those roles have reduced. But to me those employees have been up skilled and you know move to roles of higher capability. So it's both right employees moving to higher order roles and adding new capabilities in the business in line with the technologies that are energy.
00:12:00 Govind Ethiraj
So we have some understanding of how Wipro is using artificial intelligence within it's own organization and to some extent how organisations outside are doing it. But what are the big client requirements at this point of time and how are they incorporating AI into their systems? And how is AIA value add? What are the industries and sectors where AI applications become more apparent and evident and something that people can experience, particularly you and I?
00:12:25 Sanjeev Jain: So one is in terms of financial services, complete imagination in terms of how you manage your wealth. So it's absolutely looking at your portfolio, looking at your 360 degree, your entire portfolio with the financial services industry, not just the banking system, right? And then coming out with recommendations that help you plan your wealth better. I think those have been significant, I would say life cases for us then into predictive maintenance, right, with manufacturing industry. So you see something happening somewhere, it could be an incident and how could you have a faster response time and make sure that you have the systems to manage it coactively. So these are, I would say significant use cases even in healthcare. We have seen there are times when our healthcare industry will have to launch products faster or make changes faster. So which means that we have to deploy our tools. The skill, the tool set which I meant to drive productivity. Productivity is not just to reduce the head count, but productivity is to do it faster, right. So you have to reduce the turn around time so that the products can be launched faster. So we have seen those use cases where actually they're actually adding to the faster rollout and faster revenue realization for our clients like more of a top line versus we keep thinking of this as a cost reduction or a bottom line initiative and that's we are seeing that happen.
00:13:50 Govind Ethiraj
It's still early days for artificial intelligence, and particularly as infrastructure is being rolled out at a rapid clip. And we can see those investments happening literally in billions of dollars across the world and in India too. One question here is how can talent keep up with the growing needs of artificial intelligence infrastructure? After all, without the infrastructure, how do you drive all that computing power and computing sophistication that companies will need to deliver those AI outcomes that we've been talking about?
00:14:19 Sanjeev Jain: To put it in simple words, the way we think. This will happen is AI will have 3 components, right? That's just like any other. Think of it like any other infrastructure project. When you want to create infrastructure in the country, you need a highway, then you need vehicles to go on it and you need services, right? Like your restaurants or restaurants on the way, right? So you need all the three. So similarly for AI, we need a infrastructure, which is your data centers, which is your compute capability, Yeah. And then you need a lot of your software, which is your platforms, your products. And you will see that with a lot of e-commerce sites, your agritech, health tech, fintech, all that has coming back. And then you need services. Services is where actually we need talent. End of the day, all this needs talent, right? AI will not happen on its own. There's a human in the loop that there is a human that you need definitely in all this. So these 3 will come together. So the way I see that coming is, of course, a lot of us across the industry will play in all the three areas, whether it is infrastructure with data centers, whether it is in having our platforms, products to help the clients or to really have the talent, right, all the three. It's a playing field for all the three areas. For us. The way I see it coming is India Today has about 5 million software engineers and we turn about one and a half million every year. Out of that we have about 400,000 or so of which about 425,000 and odd is about AI specialized folks, it's roughly about nine to 10% that is growing to about 6,000,000 software engineers and about 1.25 million AI, right. So you can see that the AI number is going to triple and the software engineers are going to be increasing at a rate of 25% CAGR. So to me the way I see it is the industry will grow with the digital adoption, the need for software engineers will grow and within the software engineer, the need for AI skilled engineers will actually triple. So what do we do about it or what are we doing about it today? Apart from each company will do what they have to do. But I am saying together with Nasscom, we are actually having this great program which was launched few years back called Future Skills, which is now called Future Skills Prime in the new avatar. So we have identified few niche technologies as part of this Future Skills, Prime technologies like AI, IoT, blockchain, AIML, data science, cloud computing, cyber security, etcetera. And these are being provided. The curriculum of these is being provided to 100 plus colleges and the goal is to train the faculty on these. So ultimately the students get access to these courses, get the guidance from the faculty and they're not industry ready when they graduate. We have seen significant win here. We have seen that with this program along with Nasscom that we have done. We have had about 3000 plus faculty who has been trained across 100 plus colleges. About 65,000 students have taken the courses and about 25,000 have got certified. And this is actually helping in increasing employability of students. And I'm not talking about private colleges or metro, right and this I'm talking about the Tier 2 and the government institutions. I think we need that kind of mass pool to come out of India that can really help the world. See, today India is the second largest provider of IT talent to the world. As I said, we have 5 million folks. We just, you know, recently surpassed US had four and a half million. China has seven million. So we are actually on a great path here and it's for us to take these steps to really democratise AI learning industry has to work very closely with academia and really we are in the process of setting up centers of excellence in the academia for some of these niche technologies where the intent is to just provide the capability and where the students join is their aspiration. There is no obligation for anyone to join the particular company if you are building that capability.
00:18:23 Govind Ethiraj: So, India has the manpower and now we're building out the learning and skill set to be a global competitor and service in the AI space. So in a broad sense, courses and curriculums are often not on par with the current job market and particularly with AI. So there is a challenge for both the people who are creating and doing the skilling as well as of course on the demand side. So, to bridge the gap, as Sanjeev Jain has said, industry and academia need to walk the path together, holding hands quite tightly to stay relevant in this fast evolving field.
