We’ve trained all our employees on GenAI: Birlasoft CTO Ganesan Karuppanaicker

Mid-tier IT services firm Birlasoft is betting big on the latest technologies, including generative AI, Industrial IoT, Edge Computing, and AR/VR/MR technologies, to better serve its enterprise clients and achieve $1 billion in revenue. In an interaction with TechCircle, Ganesan Karuppanaicker, Chief Technology Officer of Birlasoft, discusses the latest tech trends, the company's strong open innovation ecosystem and how it collaborates with customers, partners, startups, and academia to develop innovative solutions using these disruptive technologies. Edited excerpts:
  
Which technologies are you most excited about at present and for the coming year?  
We are currently in an exciting era where disruptive technologies are revolutionising industries and profoundly impacting our lives for the better. Among these technologies, advancements in applied Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in natural language processing and computer vision, are enabling advanced automation, optimised business processes, predictive analytics, real-time data insights, decision intelligence, and innovation in new product design. The adoption of these AI technologies is expected to accelerate with the emergence of Generative AI.

Another technology that excites me is the convergence of advanced connectivity (5G), analytical AI, GenAI, and edge computing. This convergence significantly helps industries achieve increased productivity, real-time monitoring, improved product quality, reduced energy consumption, asset tracking, and lower production costs. The automotive industry is revolutionising itself by introducing self-driving connected vehicles, while the healthcare industry is using these technologies for the treatment of chronic diseases through connected medical devices.  

The third technology on my list is eXtended Reality (XR), which includes Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR). These technologies are transforming how we interact with the digital world across various sectors such as education, gaming, retail, and healthcare. Use cases include training simulations, shop floor operations simulation, and delivering immersive digital experiences. With the availability of lightweight XR devices and affordable hardware, the adoption of these technologies is expected to increase significantly.  
  
How will technology help you achieve your $1 billion revenue target that the company announced earlier this year?  
We are continuously refining our solution and service offerings in our focused industry verticals and micro-verticals. We are the preferred partner for many top customers in emerging technology areas, and we strive to maintain this position by embracing emerging and disruptive technologies to deliver business outcomes. Technology plays a vital role in building innovative domain solutions in our focused verticals, enabling our customers to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. This significantly contributes to achieving our goals and remaining the partner of choice for our customers. We also leverage technology to improve our internal processes and enhance efficiencies.  
  
How are you re-evaluating CIO strategies in cloud usage, automation, lean operations, and workforce management? How are you scaling up your tech skill sets?  
The pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption, mostly in the form of lift and shift to address immediate needs. However, this approach does not always deliver the expected value. Our cloud service capabilities and offerings help CIOs re-evaluate workloads, their value realisation, and cost management. We provide frameworks and tools to monitor and track application-wise cloud consumption, optimise cloud expenses, diversify cloud service providers, and improve operational efficiencies. We rely on the "automation first," principle that helps us work faster, smarter, and with a focus on avoiding unnecessary work in every service element we deliver to our customers. Our automation frameworks and transformation office constantly seek process simplification, automation, new process capabilities, and data insights to deskilling work and run lean operations.
We ensure that our talent remains relevant to the industry, which is crucial for both our business and their career growth. We have implemented AI-based skill management solutions, a learning management system (LMS) platform, and the Coursera platform to provide personalised learning journeys for each talent based on their current and adjacent roles. This approach greatly helps in upskilling and cross-skilling our talent to apply emerging and disruptive technologies in practice.

How are you using GenAI to enhance customer experiences?  
For the past four years, we have been leveraging NLP and NLG technologies to deliver customer experience solutions such as intelligent chatbots, smart reporting using NLG, drug discovery, and research in the pharmacovigilance (also known as drug safety). With the emergence of OpenAI and other open-source LLMs, we have developed self-service chatbots, virtual assistants, and product marketing content generation solutions for industries like life sciences and oil field services. These GenAI-based solutions facilitate easy adoption by our customers while delivering significantly enhanced experiences. We have recently partnered with Microsoft to establish a Generative AI Centre of Excellence. Through this initiative, we have trained all our 12,000 Birlasoft employees on GenAI. Additionally, we have built a GenAI acceleration platform to help our customers quickly develop GenAI-based solutions.  
  
What sets you apart from your competitors, and how are you using tech as an enabler for innovation? 
We have developed niche domain solution accelerators across our focused verticals, including manufacturing, BFSI, life sciences, and energy & utilities. These proven solution accelerators enable rapid development of domain-centric solutions for our customers. All these solutions leverage Cloud, Data Platforms, AI/ML, GenAI, Industrial IoT, Edge Computing, and AR/VR/MR technologies. Our state-of-the-art co-Innovation and customer experience centers showcase these solutions.  
We have also established a strong open innovation ecosystem, collaborating with customers, partners, startups, and academia to build differentiated solutions using emerging and disruptive technologies. We aim to continue this momentum in the coming year.