Strategic move: TCS to skill entire staff in upcoming Gen AI expertise

TCS, the country’s largest IT services exporter, will train its entire staff of over 5 lakh software engineers on the upcoming Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) opportunity, according to a senior official.

Shiva Ganesan, head of the company’s recently created ‘AI.Cloud’ unit, told the news agency that as a business opportunity, General AI is still in its “early days” and the use cases are still small. PTI,

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The company, which a few months ago revealed it was involved in 250 generative AI-powered projects, is also using the intelligence gained from Gen AI to accelerate ongoing work for clients, he said.

“So these are probably smaller use cases right now. This is before the huge change when we even talk about complementary assets and growth. Is there any timeline for this, I think right now wait and see, we will have to see how the game unfolds in the coming quarters,” he said.

As it prepares for a future that will see greater demand for AI offerings, TCS is in investment mode, primarily grooming employees with skills and also partnering with the right entities, officials said. .

“The workforce is getting ready and prepared and it is just a matter of time when the entire organization itself will be ready for (General) AI,” he said.

Asked about a target time period for when it plans to complete training of employees on general AI skills, Ganesan declined to specify, but said that given the current rate of training there is no Can also do mathematics easily, under which it has trained more than 1.50 lakh employees. in skill in about seven months.

Its Chief Technology Officer Harrick Winn said, “We are very confident about building one of the world’s largest AI-ready workforces for the future, so I think we can safely say this with a high level of confidence.” Are.”

Ganesan said that part of the skills the company is providing also focuses on non-technical areas that are in keeping with the broader goals of the organization.

When Ganesan was asked about profitability and whether there would be any compromise with the easy availability of tools like Chat GPT at the consumer level, he did not answer the question directly.

He said that general AI solutions require a lot of rigor and are complex to execute.

“There are a number of things to consider in terms of the way we go about this. One is the right guardrails, security, privacy, you know, a lot of hard work goes into the architecture and building of these systems and what value will come out of deploying them or implementing them,” Ganesan said.

(With PTI inputs)