Wipro CTO Sandhya Arun dismissed fears around the extinction of the IT services sector at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, calling the scope of technology services far broader than most people assume. “All of the hype and focus right now is on coding, but IT services is so much more expansive. It is everything from chip to cloud to compute. It’s about how we deliver business solutions and solve problems for clients in terms of technology by delivering business outcomes. So from that perspective, what is visible from the outside is just the tip of the iceberg,” she noted.
From Coding to Outcomes
As IT service firms make visible efforts to branch out into new revenue streams—such as TCS partnering with AMD to build AI data centres—Arun said that all of this now falls within the purview of IT services. “In fact, I would say Information Technology is a term that is no longer applicable. We should probably call it Intelligence Technology services,” she added.
Commenting on the recent market turmoil sparked by Anthropic’s release of a plugin of their new AI tool Cowork, Arun said that while the transformative nature of the technology had not caught them by surprise, the market’s reaction “was a bit of a surprise.” However, she believed the industry is now bracing for the transformation, which will also open new ways to engage with customers.
The Bengaluru-based firm views partnerships with AI-native firms as a means to stay ahead of the curve while scaling. “This is an ongoing strategy for us under which we partner with startups, invest in new-age tech firms and hyperscalers,” Arun said, referring to Wipro Ventures’ investment in Factory, an agent-native software development platform.
“We are totally agnostic because we focus on business outcomes and look at these technologies as enablers. There are many excellent AI tech providers today, and it is a continuous evolution. Any new startup can cause a disruption anywhere. We have to be ready to partner with tech firms to bring the best to our clients,” she said, adding that future investments were always in the offing for Wipro.
Combinatorial Talent War
The firm also does not observe any slowdown in hiring freshers and will continue onboarding at a steady pace, given the dual challenge of transforming the workforce. “It’s a combinatorial strategy of both hiring freshers and upskilling experienced people in the industry who have the expertise of how businesses are run, and they work globally. They may have to change their attitudes about how to work with AI in a different way, whereas the younger generation that comes from colleges will have no unlearning to do. But they will have a lot of learning to do in terms of understanding the industry and how to deal with client expectations,” she explained.
Arun added that the continued evolution of operating models within IT is an ongoing shift that cannot be pinned to a timeline. “As we change, the technology itself will also go through upgrades, so it’s very difficult to say when the transformation will be complete,” she noted.