There’s widespread fear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take away a lot of jobs. “I think to start with, it might. But it doesn’t mean fewer people will work, it only means that people will do more sophisticated work — creative and business oriented, and the mundane, run-of-the-mill work will start getting delegated to AI,” says Piyush Jha, MD, Head, India, APAC, GlobalLogic. A veteran at GlobalLogic, he has played a key role in establishing the design labs at GlobalLogic India, thereby expanding the end-to-end engineering services offering. In a recent interview, he spoke to Sudhir Chowdhary on GlobalLogic’s operations in India and some of the hottest technologies such as ChatGPT, Bard and AI.(Edited excerpts)
What are GlobalLogic’s priorities for this financial year? Can you tell us about the operations at present?
Close to two years ago, we became a Hitachi Group company, and we started scaling our business to fast-track our growth and where we want to be, aligning our vision to be a $5 billion company by 2030. Currently, my focus is on managing and expanding GlobalLogic’s India and APAC centre operations, while also putting on octane the executive leadership, technology, and innovation genes of the company.
At present, we are catering to many business units and are exploring new avenues to scale. We are extensively working in the BFSI, communications & media, technology & ISVs, medtech, and healthcare industries. Within this year, we plan to double our focus on the automotive and embedded sectors and expand our horizon in the next-gen technologies, as we strongly believe these spaces are in the process of disruption. We continue to work more with Hitachi so we can harness their broader range of offerings. My priority has always been to establish India as an innovation hub and not a labour arbitrage capital.
How is India ER&D spearheading the innovation charter for GlobalLogic?
In the last couple of years, we have started to invest more in innovation-centric solutions. For example, our investment into AI, ML, IoT, and 5G to fast-track engineering research & development (ER&D) in the last few years has got us where we are. We are also focusing on harnessing the potential of Metaverse, AR, and cryptocurrency. In fact, we launched GlobalLogic’s internal currency called GloCoins. We have been working in generative AI technologies for six quarters now. We are dedicated to getting ahead of our customers so that when they start demanding such solutions, we are equipped to provide them. That is where we keep contributing and reinvesting in these technologies will augment the business and propel India’s digital transformation journey to establish itself as the global innovation hub.
What are your thoughts on ChatGPTand Bard?
While ChatGPT took the world by storm recently, this has been brewing for the past two years, and for the last six quarters, we have been working on open AI and generative AI technologies. What is at this point being feared as technology that will make humans redundant will slowly become the best assist to humankind. While it has started to make life more seamless, does that take away the human element? I think it doesn’t because experiences cannot be replaced by AI. It can become a co-pilot, an assistant, a typist, or a search engine but the creativity behind the facade will always have to be human.
What is GlobalLogic’s future roadmap and long-term strategy?
There are three different horizons that I would like to delve into. The first horizon is to keep investing more in the technologies of tomorrow. Our experience, expertise, and capability to drive innovation in the technology space will keep us ahead of the curve. Moreover, we are focusing on sustainability and social development to give back to society.
The second horizon is growing more markets in APAC. We established our Japan presence last year and the Japan business is growing at 40-50%. We recently established our Australia and New Zealand presence. It will become a good growth vehicle by next year. We are exploring setting up our presence either in Dubai or somewhere in the Middle East. We will establish a tripod around the APAC soon so that we drive more growth from there.The third horizon is to do more M&As. At this point, we are evaluating a couple of companies and in the last one and a half years, GlobalLogic has announced three acquisitions. I am also looking at how we create a couple of M&A opportunities within India itself in the next 12-24 months.