Davos/New Delhi:
The success of companies in using artificial intelligence (AI) depends on how they reskill their employees, Wipro Ltd Executive Chairman Rishad Premji told NDTV on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos.
AI is a hot topic at Davos this time, with business and political leaders acknowledging the emergence of AI at the core of industries and governance.
“Skilling is important to be able to have talent that’s AI-ready, to be able to deploy and leverage the technology. It is also important to reskill people that jobs may be redundant or less relevant in an AI world. So, the success and adoption of AI will be tightly coupled with the reskilling agenda we have as companies, as an industry, and as a country,” Mr Premji said.
“Both have to go hand in hand because the technology is far ahead of our ability to adopt it today. The only way this scales is if you drive the change, and the change management happens through people, and people will adopt and enable that change management if they feel secure about their own future, which is then tied to skilling. The reskilling and the AI agenda, in my mind, go hand in hand,” Mr Premji, who joined Wipro in 2007 and worked in several roles before becoming Executive Chairman in 2019, told NDTV.
Wipro And AI
Mr Premji said they have made AI “all-pervasive inside of Wipro.”
“The advent of any technology creates opportunity, right? Because the technology in itself has limited bearing. The value of the technology is if you’re able to put it to use in solving specific business problems, right? We’ve done a couple of things as a company over the last year. One is we’ve made AI all-pervasive inside of Wipro,” Mr Premji said.
He said they did it by making 2.35 lakh employees go through “generative AI training 101” starting with himself.
“We have about 50,000 people who’ve gone through higher levels of skilling and certification on generative AI, 5,000 people at the next level, 500 people at the highest level in the organisation. So we’re driving it all-pervasively within the company to drive a very strong AI mindset, skill set, and tool set inside of the organisation,” he said.
Three Things About AI In Wipro
Mr Premji said the company is focussing on three things when it comes to AI.
“One, how do we operate better as a company? How do we leverage this technology (AI) to disrupt ourselves? And we’ve implemented this in all of our functions, whether it be HR, finance, legal, sales, skilling, recruitment, etc. I’ll give you a very simple example. We sign 400-page master service agreements with our customers. We sign up for specific delivery commitments. We sign up for certain timelines. We sign up for fines when we don’t deliver it. How many of our delivery managers are reading 400-page documents? It’s unreasonable to expect them to do that.
“So sponsored by our chief legal officer, we’re driving this now. We’re leveraging the technology to actually distill that down into a few pages which can be consumable and very clearly actionable. So there is a real strong application of the technology in functions across the company.
“Two is how do we deliver better? How do we do the work that we’re doing inside of the organization more impactfully, faster, more autonomously, etc? And that’s a big focus. And we’re seeing a lot of impact on that, specifically fixed price projects.
“And then the last is how do we change the game? So how do we come up with very context-specific, domain-specific use cases for customers? Operate better, manage better, deliver better, and change the game,” Mr Premji said.
He said the one thing that’s becoming more and more exciting is agentic AI, a probabilistic technology with high adaptability to changing environments and events. The advantage of agentic AI is it’s autonomous.
“It’s highly specialised. It can self-heal and self-learn. And it can call through APIs on other agents, other AI agents, as well as on humans.. The technology exists. The ability of leveraging it to solve business-case problems, real-life problems, is where the magic is… There is no AI without data.
“The challenge with most large enterprises is they’re complex. They’re messy at times. They don’t have modernised applications. They don’t have data that’s well-structured, well-architected. How do they leverage it completely to get the benefits?
“Those are things that customers are very much focused on. And so the opportunity to serve customers from a tech services perspective… I think it presents a tremendous opportunity,” Mr Premji said.
He is also on the boards of Wipro Enterprises Limited, a leading player in FMCG and infrastructure engineering; Wipro-GE, a joint healthcare venture between Wipro and General Electric, and the Azim Premji Foundation, one of the largest not-for-profit initiatives in India.
The five-day meeting at Davos that began on Monday explored how to relaunch growth, harness new technologies and strengthen social and economic resilience, according to the World Economic Forum. The global meeting saw participation by nearly 3,000 leaders from over 130 countries, including 350 governmental leaders.
India’s participation at Davos aimed to strengthen partnerships, attract investment, and position the country as a global leader in sustainable development and technological innovation. India sent five Union ministers, three chief ministers, and ministers from several other states to the WEF this time.