IT major Wipro is betting big on artificial intelligence (AI) and will integrate AI into all its solutions and offerings over the next six months.
“Over the next six months, 100% of our solutions and offerings will be integrated with AI. This is what we call AI first. Every practice, every service line, within the organization, will integrate AI into every solution we have,” said Thierry Delaporte, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Managing Director (MD), Wipro, at BusinessStandard.
Wipro is seeing a significant increase in the number of AI-based transactions. For the July-September 2023-24 (Q2FY24) quarter, it signed large contracts with a total contract value (TCV) of $1.3 billion, the highest in 9 quarters. Although the company did not specify what percentage of these transactions are driven by AI, Delaporte said: “We observed that between this quarter and the previous one, the number of transactions driven by AI doubled . Its volume still remains modest. But the speed at which this is progressing is remarkable.
Currently, Wipro is seeing rapid adoption of AI in industries such as healthcare, consumer services and financial services, followed closely by high-tech and utilities.
Earlier this year, Wipro committed to investing $1 billion to develop its AI capabilities over the next three years. It also launched Wipro ai360, an AI-driven innovation ecosystem with the aim of integrating AI into every platform, tool and solution used internally and offered to customers. In August, Wipro launched a new Center of Excellence (CoE) on Generative AI (GenAI) in partnership with IIT-Delhi. The CoE will serve as an R&D hub where teams will work jointly to create innovative solutions using AI, machine learning and other technologies.
Wipro’s AI priorities are set at the CEO level. “I chair an AI council every week with about 10 to 12 members of the leadership team… that’s where we spend a lot of our investment, time and effort, with our clients as well that with our partners, to ensure that we are transforming into an AI-powered organization, quarter after quarter,” Delaporte said.
Wipro is strategizing consciously to become an AI-driven company by training and upskilling its employees. “We want our employees to understand AI, know how to use it and improve their productivity. We want to train 100% of our employees in AI. In just three months, we trained 180,000 people in the basic principles of generative AI,” Delaporte said. “We have an ecosystem of approximately 55,000 AI practitioners across the organization. »
Wipro is also taking an AI-based approach to advising its customers. Wipro’s consulting team has developed industry offerings to help clients develop their own AI strategy. “Today, we have teams who go to customers every day and help them find their way. Every customer wants to engage with us on this topic but they don’t necessarily know where to start and differentiate between hype and reality. We help them with that,” Delaporte said.
Over the past couple of months, Wipro has launched various AI programs within the organization. “We want to be customer zero on a lot of the solutions we offer to our customers… whether it’s our finance team, our HR team, our marketing team, our sales team or our legal team, they all drive our AI programs. One example is employee background checks, which previously took weeks, have been reduced to a day,” he added.
