How AI is helping ITeS firms push the boundaries of what is possible

If there is one industry where AI is almost a natural fit for building competitive edge, it is IT-enabled services (ITeS). “Some of the popular use cases of AI in IT/ITeS industry are creating safer and better information systems to deal with the huge volumes of data, enhancing customer experience by predicting market trends and customer behaviour, enabling process automation and efficiency analysis, simplifying IT operations management, managing huge complex data with MLOps, and more,” says Prashanth Kaddi, Partner at Deloitte India. “Exploring these use cases can provide a competitive edge to companies to stay ahead of the curve.”

At the same time, the spectre of job displacement casts a shadow of uncertainty over the workforce. Deloitte’s State of AI in India report reveals that a significant number of businesses listed job automation as one of their primary use cases for AI. The report found that 77 per cent of respondents—200 Indian business leaders and 2,620 business leaders globally participated in the survey—expressed concerns within their organisations about the possibility of AI adoption leading to job losses. Yet, evidence alludes to a distinct perspective being adopted to address this deep-seated fear. “Do we see software developers going away? No. What we see is software developers and digital engineering teams that are assisted by AI replacing those that are not using AI. Even at this early stage, we are seeing north of 30 per cent productivity gains in some of these activities,” says Pandurang Kamat, Chief Technology Officer of Persistent Systems, a mid-tier IT company. “So, we definitely see a future where digital engineering has a strong AI-assisted component.”

This AI-assisted engineering is helping ITeS firms to both manage their own work better, and also to provide more valuable services to their customers.

Let’s examine a few examples of the former first. Infosys’s use of specialised AI models for code generation, code completion, documentation and testing has brought about a significant boost in developer productivity. Additionally, the company says the implementation of a data and AI engineering platform has facilitated faster time-to-market for its AI services, helped extreme automation across lifecycles, and enabled democratisation of AI capabilities for hundreds of data scientists within the organisation, resulting in three times faster delivery times. Then, Persistent Systems’ Autonomous Insights initiative simplifies executive decision-making—it scans email communication, meeting calendars, client exchanges and more for negative sentiments and project risks, and generates email summaries with actionable insights on managing risks and making decisions in various business areas.

And in terms of client services, Infosys, for example, has built several solutions. Example: an AI solution for intelligent prediction of on-time deliveries, which has helped a logistics company improve its business performance and reduce revenue loss. Another example: a tool to enable hearing-impaired users enjoy existing video content by automatically generating visual captioning, close captioning, and sounds of daily living. “We are leveraging generative AI capabilities to reimagine our services and solve interesting problems for our clients,” says Mohammed Rafee Tarafdar, CTO of Infosys. “As we move into an intelligent era, the emergence of generative AI will provide an opportunity to leapfrog and deliver exponential value to our clients.”

Wipro, with its AI Centre of Excellence (CoE), has enabled National Health Service Scotland to progress towards the institutionalisation and large-scale application of AI, while British outsourcing firm Mitie has gained real-time insights from a system based on the Anomaly Detection solution of Wipro Holmes, its AI platform. “In the ITeS sector, AI-based applications can profoundly impact how people and processes work, how businesses engage with each other, and how products or experiences are delivered,” says Subha Tatavarti, CTO of Wipro Limited. “With greater research and innovation, AI can potentially engage more relevantly with the consumer, thus improving end user experiences,”

Persistent Systems’ Kamat says clients are increasingly demanding that the company’s engineers, business analysts, and teams adopt an AI-inclusive approach to their designs. “More and more, our effort is channelled towards how we can deliver on the promise of AI in an enterprise-grade way,” he says. The Pune-based company has built solutions that analyse a plethora of company-specific information including CRM data, different systems of records data, CSAT rating, etc., to help enterprises interact with their own data and get highly contextualised answers while maintaining the privacy, security and sanctity of that data. One such tool, based on generative AI, is being used to analyse large sets of clinical trials data to understand the inclusion and exclusion criteria, and find the most matching patient.

Diverse clients, diverse use cases. For the ITeS industry, AI is the future. 

@binu_t_paul