Even as AI and GenAI start-ups in the country are bucking the global trend and witnessing a spurt in investments, the biggies are in no mood to catch the AI-GenAI bus. All the top-tier IT firms are increasingly integrating AI and GenAI solutions into their products and services to meet the growing needs of their respective clients.

“We are seeing the rise of AI-infused service lines rather than stand-alone AI demand. The re-imagination of contact centres with AI, for example, is showing a very strong trend. Similarly, AI re-imagined business process services and AI-powered cloud modernisation are also seeing strong traction. So, it is safe to say that AI is now an integral part of everything we do and will continue to significantly benefit almost all services in the coming quarters,” K Krithivasan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of the IT major TCS, recently said, addressing the investor call after announcing the second quarter results.

“On AI/Generative AI, companies have moved past the point of experimentation through proofs of concepts and are increasingly viewing AI and Generative AI as strategic assets, integrating them into the entire value chain,” he said.

He spent considerable time explaining how the company is working with its clients to build solutions to tap the GenAI opportunity. So do the other top CXOs of companies like Infosys.

“The GenAI revenue pipeline is getting stronger. With Accenture indicating investments of $3 billion and TCS investing $1.5 billion in bolstering AI and Gen AI capabilities, significant momentum is building for product use cases into revenue-generating projects,” a Nasscom report said.

During the quarter, TCS reported over 600 GenAI-related engagements which more than doubled from the last quarter’s 270 engagements, Krithivasan said, answering a query from an analyst.

Answering a similar question, Infosys CEO and Managing Director Salil Parekh said that GenAI is an integral component in its deals. “More of the Gen AI focus is productivity. For any of the large deals that we are looking at, there is a Generative AI component to it. Now is it driving the large deal, not in itself, but it is very much a part of that large deal,” he pointed out.

No wonder the buzz around GenAI reached a new level in the quarter as it witnessed 59 GenAI activities as against just 18 in the same quarter last year, showing more than three-fold growth. The number of collaborations and partnerships, which include joint-go-to-market initiatives, saw a 25 per cent jump to 30.  

The quarter witnessed several launches of platforms, which include Avalok.ai by Fractal which harnesses the reasoning abilities of generative models to work with structured data. The company also launched vaidya.ai, an AI platform designed to provide free and accessible healthcare assistance. Infosys launched SLMs (small language models) that are trained on multi-sourced structured data.

The report cites examples of product development partnerships between Capgemini and SAP; Accenture and Unilever; Wipro and Google Cloud’; and Infosys and Nvidia. 

Talent upskilling

As AI/GenAI becomes more vogue, top-tier companies have increased efforts to upskill their employees in relevant skills. Genpact reported an aggregate 10 million hours of trainings in upskilling and reskilling till the second quarter. As many as one lakh of its employees are training in foundational AI and 18,000 employees in advanced training.

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