IT services major Wipro’s Chairman Rishad A Premji, while acknowledging that the company has long been familiar with AI-powered products, said that the next decade will be the age of AI. “We have been investing ahead of the curve to understand AI and leverage its power inside Wipro, and to create solutions for our clients,” he said while addressing the shareholders.
“FY23 was a pivotal year for technology, with artificial intelligence taking a quantum leap. While we have been long familiar with AI-powered products (think predictive text, digital personal assistants, chat bots), OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E brought discussions about the use of generative AI emphatically into the public domain,” Rishad Premji said.
He further added that Wipro’s Generative AI Center for Excellence has conducted research with leading academic institutions for two years now and has built accelerators and solutions, frameworks like WeGA (Wipro Enterprise Generative AI), developed competency through the Wipro AI Academy, and executed key pilot programs for its clients. Wipro’s AI practice has created several cross-industry solutions, including text summarization and literature mining to synthesize large amounts of enterprise data, automated code conversion from legacy to modern languages, and built marketing accelerators that generate product descriptions and enhance search optimization.
Moreover, talking about the company’s annual performance, he said that Wipro’s revenue in FY23 crossed $11 billion, up 11.5 per cent on-year in constant currency terms. “This makes it our second consecutive year of double-digit growth since we began our transformation journey in 2020,” he added. He also talked about Wipro’s biggest buyback for the value of Rs 120 billion at the price of Rs 445 per equity share. Wipro’s order bookings in total contract value terms grew 28 per cent on-year and the company finished the year with two consecutive quarters of bookings of over $4.1 billion each. “We signed 55 large deals with a total contract value of $3.9 billion, growing 66.5 per cent YoY. Our IT services operating profits were at their highest ever, in absolute terms. Bookings TCV with Hypergrowth Partners in FY23 continued to be strong,” he said. “Overall, in the last three years, the share of partner bookings as a percentage of our total bookings rose from 25 per cent to 44 per cent in FY23, he added.
While he acknowledged the difficult global macro-economic environment, Rishad Premji said that the company’s efficiency and growth-focused solutions allowed it to respond quickly and pertinently to these developments. “We ended the year with strong bookings, a growth of 28% from last year, and hired 22,000 Next-Gen Associates (or freshers, as we called them earlier), our highest for a single year,” he said.