With generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) — the new kid on the block — starting to gain ground, IT behemoth Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Friday launched a platform to accelerate the adoption of the technology.The platform, TCS AI WisdomNext, aggregates multiple GenAI services into a single interface and enables firms to rapidly adopt next-gen technologies at scale and helps in lowering costs. It removes barriers for customers to develop and launch business solutions, and permits real-time experimentation across vendors and open-source large language models (LLMs).
“While AI has been around for some time and GenAI is the new kid on the technology block; the combination of GenAI and AI is starting to materialise. Last year was all about organisations trying to understand this technology, where to use it and how good it is,” said Harrick Vin, chief technology officer at TCS. This will continue, he said, as different organisations have experimented at different speed.“Scaling of the technology will take time, like cloud which took time to reach a scale. The adoption of GenAI will be much faster than that of many other technologies, but it will still take time. It’s not going to happen in six months or one year…,” Vin told FE on the sidelines of the platform launch.
According to Vin, on the GenAI front, companies are moving up the value chain from proof of concepts to production. The TCS AI WisdomNext platform offers pre-configured blueprints — with built-in guardrails to ensure compliance with regulations — for industry-specific solutions that use GenAI. These would enable businesses from across the spectrum to use these blueprints to design and deploy AI solutions much faster.Siva Ganesan, head, AI.Cloud Unit at TCS, said: “The platform helps customers to unlock the full potential of their data, drive greater business innovation and efficiency, and gain a competitive edge”.
TCS AI WisdomNext helps customers to harness the power of GenAI to solve business problems, Ganesan said, adding, the platform was showcased to its over 100 customers. The platform is seeing interest from across verticals such as BFSI, retail, consumer goods, travel, manufacturing, life sciences and healthcare, he added.Vin flagged two challenges in the implementation of GenAI. One is technical, as there are 100 ways of implementing this technology or there are 1,000 use cases. “The question is, how does one design and build a solution?”The second is “change management”. Change management challenges basically relate to where should the data reside, who is able to do what with the data and what kind of models will get trained.Both challenges will take time to get addressed, Vin added.TCS has already trained more than 300,000 employees in AI, its CEO and MD K Krithivasan had said earlier. TCS’ share price closed at Rs 3,892.90, up 1.62% from the previous close, on the BSE on Friday.
