Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com
BENGALURU: Indian IT services providers Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosysand Wipro are betting on artificial intelligence(AI) platforms to improve delivery of solutions and drive faster growth from clients.
These companies are also looking to offer the AI platforms, embedded as part of solutions until now, separately to clients.
Among the three competing platforms — TCS Ignio, Infosys Nia and Wipro HOLMES — only TCS’ Ignio makes revenue independently, at about $60 million.
ET reported on Tuesday that TCS aims to clock $100 million in revenue from its Ignio platform by the end of this fiscal year.
Infosys Nia has been widely implemented across existing service lines, while Wipro’s HOLMES has been applied to business operations across 350 of the company’s 1,250-odd clients, analysts tracking the sector said.
These solutions, which are built using AI and automation platforms, help in anomaly detection and invoice processing in business operations. AI-based solutions are now used to solve complex business problems. For instance, Infosys recently launched CollectEdge, powered by Infosys Nia, to help banks and credit unions transform their collection processes and systems.
“While Ignio scores higher on execution, Wipro HOLMES has a strong technology backbone. Nia has seen mixed results,” said Tapati Bandopadhyay, vice-president at HfS Research. “Not every business problem needs AI. For example, software maintenance is the lowest hanging fruit that can be automated. However, these companies need to push more use of these solutions,” she said.
However, it could be a little off the mark to call these solutions AI platforms yet. Technology service providers “are conflating their investments in IP platforms with their investments in AI. For example, Ignio does have a small AI component, but most of the product is not AI but rules-based and procedural,” said Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of Everest Group, an IT advisory and research firm.
The IT companies are investing in these platforms “diligently” but have yet to catch up, he said.
“The Indian service providers are taking advantage of a key change in the market where IP is now becoming much more important and clients expect and reward service providers that bring some of their own IP to the table,” said Bendor-Samuel.
Wipro is aiming to increase the use of HOLMES. “Now, the person (Rohit Adlakha) who runs Wipro HOLMES is also my CIO, so there will be more deployment. Over 15% of the work is being done by bots in fixed price projects,” said Wipro CEO Abidali Neemuchwala.
