Wipro has committed to investing about $1 billion over the next three years into AI360, launched in July 2023, said Wipro Executive Chairman Rishad Premji. The company is also training 2.5 lakh people while infusing the thinking of AI across the organisation.
Speaking to CNBC-TV18’s Managing Editor Shereen Bhan on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, Premji stressed the mindset of leveraging AI pervasively within the organisation. The company is enforcing and infusing AI with different elements of the organisation, according to Premji.
Interestingly, Premji said that the HR department is leveraging AI for background verification. The Bengaluru-headquartered IT company’s chatbot, which has 40 functions with 98% accuracy, has received more than 4.7 million queries. The functions or use cases of this chatbot will be expanded to 100–150 from 40 currently.
Premji said, “We're using it (the chatbot) for content generation on marketing. We're using it to enable us to do a better job, faster job of responding to RFIs (requests for information) for sales pitches. So there's a pervasive mindset of leveraging AI within the company.”
On the customer end, the company is unfolding a twin-track strategy. One is focused on the user experience—chat, contractual completions, assistance in transactions, and procedures to infuse AI into differentiated products. “That's the whole mindset of customer service contact centres. Driving that pervasively as I say, it's largely built on POC mode, I think it has opportunities to scale,” said Premji.
Secondly, he said, AI will leverage productivity for customers on the bedrock of a very strong mindset of safe, secure and transparent data. It will help customers to drive code better, develop synthetic data to allow for faster testing, and protect data more impactfully.
Talking about the governance of AI, Premji said, “We've just set up an AI Governance Committee. We have a chief security and AI data governance leader in the company who reports to our General Counsel. That team's job is to look at every use case that we look at and look at it from a governance standpoint, from an individual assessment, from a social assessment, from a technical assessment, from an environmental assessment to make sure it's okay to go out.”
Large healthcare and telecom companies are among Wipro’s clients that seek to leverage Generative AI to deliver high-quality service and generate synthetic data to test products, respectively.
Premji further suggested that he doesn’t know what kind of acceleration AI will have in the coming years and said, “Is it going to have a mobile kind of journey? Is it going to have a cloud kind of journey? But I'm very hopeful that customers will look more and more at leveraging this for real business impact, faster than we anticipated,” he said.
Premji emphasized that the company is very likely to experiment in different areas, even if it hurts some revenue in the short term because it can create a use case for how the technology’s road ahead will look in the long term.
“There will certainly be some jobs that will require complete reimagination and complete reskilling. And that's the job of us as companies, as industry, and as government to help reskill people to make them more relevant for the future,” Premji highlighted.
Premji said that, in the short term, AI is an augmenter and therefore people should embrace it instead of resisting it.
