Gen AI takes centre stage at Chairmans’ communications to shareholders

At India’s largest IT services company Tata Consultancy Limited, a large portion of chairman N Chandrasekaran’s letter to the shareholders revolved around Gen AI. He said that across industries globally, AI is one of multiple mega trends shaping business priorities, and that Gen AI technologies would impact almost every sector in every country henceforth.

“Enterprises have already invested in cloud, data infrastructure and large processing power, which will aid AI/ Gen AI. Gen AI will not only improve productivity, but also create impact we hitherto have not seen or imagined,” he wrote. Explaining TCS’s skin in the gen AI game, he said the company consolidated its AI and Cloud expertise in FY 2024 with the creation of the AI.Cloud unit.

"In addition, each of the business groups is developing domain-specific AI/GenAI offerings relevant to the industry value chain. Over 300,000 employees have been upskilled on GenAI technologies in FY 2024. TCS’ products and services are also being enhanced with AI capabilities," he wrote. His bullishnesh also saw its validation as TCS recently launched its ‘WisdomNext platform’ aiming to aggregate GenAI technologies into a single platform that can speed up innovation, scale and development of technologies to its clients.

Again at Infosys, chairman Nandan M. Nilekani’s shareholder address revolved completely around Gen AI, where he said that only now is some clarity is emerging on this technology’s industry use, with the hype dying down and semblance setting in. But Nandan’s tone seems to be more guarded and pragmatic. “It is also clear that there won’t be a scenario where we’ll have ‘one model to rule them all’,” he wrote.

While he sees GEN AI to be not very different from previous generations of technology with the rise of powerful open-source AI models accelerating the AI deployment, he cautions that there could be a concentration risk in the hardware and cloud infrastructure space as actual use cases start emerging. While we currently see the use of the AI as to how the industry would put this into use and explaining the challenge, “Enterprise AI, on the other hand, requires a root and branch surgery of the complex and multi generation technology (both legacy and modern) that lie within firms. The AI models themselves will become commodities. The challenge will be to orchestrate the extensive data inside the corporation, both structured and unstructured, explicit and tacit, in a way that it is consumable by AI,” he wrote.

Calling it an unrivalled opportunity, enterprises will need to have ‘both an AI foundry for experimentation and an AI factory for scaling up,’ he wrote. Infosys over the last couple of years has been pushing ‘Topaz’ its business offering with gen AI capabilities.

At HCL Tech, chairman Roshni Nadar Malhotra also laid emphasis on generative AI (GenAI) opening up new opportunities for enterprises growth and the company infusing GenAI into its offerings. “We continue to invest aggressively to build new capabilities across our portfolio themes of Digital, Engineering, Cloud, AI and Software. A key part of this capacity building is boosting our in-house R&D and innovation engine, deepening partnerships across the ecosystem and most importantly, upskilling our people, who remain the biggest enabler of our ability to drive digital transformation of our clients,” she wrote.