Wipro's Executive Chairman Rishad Premji has said the IT giant will invest a billion dollars in AI in the next three years. In an exclusive interaction with Rahul Kanwal, Executive Director, Business Today, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Premji shared that Wipro was aggressively adopting generative AI technology.
"I'm a big believer in the opportunity of what AI can create and generative AI can create, particularly from an enhancement and augmentation perspective. It creates some disruption on the way, but lots of innovation has created some disruption along the way. But, overall, I'm a big believer in the enhancement and augmentation that it drives for productivity, for opportunity, etc.," Premji said.
Premji said Wipro's investment in AI would be holistic in nature and not limited to acquisitions.
"We've called out over the last 3-6 months about our investments in gen AI. We're going to invest a billion dollars more holistically over the next three years. This is not going to be about going out and buying a few companies. This is about a very strong mindset of infusing pervasively AI into everything that we do as an organisation," Premji said.
He further shared that the company was aggressively training its employees on generative AI. "We've trained 209 [thousand] out of the 245,000 people in the company on gen AI 101. Does this make them technical experts on AI? Absolutely not. But what it does is, it very strongly inculcates the mindset of looking at this as an opportunity enhancer for the way you do your work," Premji explained.
"So, if you're a business analyst, if you're a local junior engineer, how can you be looking at opportunities to do your work better, how can you be taking out 25% of the effort you're putting in so you can do 25% more output at the end of the day," he added.
Premji cited Wipro's use of generative AI to enhance background verification of employees as a use case.
"We've significantly enhanced background verification, which is a big element in our business, leveraging gen AI. The other is changing employee experiences. We've created a chatbot, it's called Wipro Now. It's got 40 functions or 40 use cases - everything from employee benefits to applying for medical leave to applying for leave to looking at your appraisal," Premji said.