WisdomNext to augment TCS’s GenAI offering

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is looking at the launch of TCS AI WisdomNext as a significantly differentiated offering for its customer base. The platform is meant to aggregate multiple Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) services into a single interface and eventually help organisations in adopting technologies at scale and lower costs.

Harrick Vin, TCS’ Chief Technology Officer told Business Today that this must be viewed as a platform. “Today, building AI solutions is an art form and doing that at scale to deliver value is hard. The platform approach helps in looking at a problem differently or understanding which guardrails need to be built.”

This new platform will be a part of the AI.Cloud unit of TCS. “It will get richer over time as we gain more experience,” said Vin. With a large customer base, TCS is already in the business of building solutions. “They are already coming to us and we just need to offer more value.”

Siva Ganesan, Head – AI.Cloud Business Unit, maintained that the underlying factors is based on the premise that technology is dynamic. “We have to make the right choice through a platform that allows you to consume differently and that’s how scale come in,” he said. The issue is in convincing customers to go for it and Ganesan was optimistic on that. “Many of them want to know how to use the technology and the platform allows you to embrace it and experiment leading to friction being reduced,” he told BT. 

The objective is to get technology to solve a business problem, he said, adding “This platform allows you to jump to a business context quickly.”

The emergence and subsequent disruption of ChatGPT has been a huge development. Ganesan said a lot of people are consuming and this platform’s versatility gives one a choice. Picking out the example of how enterprises have artifacts or documents, where not everything is on the system in the form of text or images, he explained how the platform could help.

“With this and GenAI techniques, you get tacit knowledge buried in the system. That is made available to an engineer to develop next-gen solutions more efficiently without scanning documents. It basically means that the process is eliminated or rendered more efficient,” said Ganesan.

On the issue of the extent of disruption, his view is that one must embrace the possibilities of this technology and doing things in a safe, scalable manner. “You must harness the technology rather than be threatened by it. If one looks at computing history, it was mainframes and then distributed computing with client servers before moving to cloud and now we have this. EVERY era brings in change and organisations like us have adapted.”