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Wipro chief growth officer Stephanie Trautman shares why the latest tech innovations are more consequential for business than ever.
The past few years proved that we have entered a new era of ongoing uncertainty and heightened risks. A reshaped business and work environment, an evolving geopolitical landscape, and the increasing impact of climate change, combined with the rapid advancements in technology, are creating a new set of challenges for business leaders.
Against this backdrop, we are seeing a shift in business priorities and investments, as companies look to optimize investments, create new efficiencies, and shore up their balance sheets to weather external shocks.
While navigating the uncertainty, one thing we advise clients on — and adopt to our own business at Wipro — is to not lose sight of the long game.
As business leaders, the decisions we make today, at this critical juncture, will define and shape the next phase of business evolution and be a key determinant of success in the decades to come.
Further, in an era of accelerated innovation, technology will become even more central to success — in many cases shaping the future of entire industries.
As many of our clients grapple with balancing immediate needs and future goals, we advise them to align technology strategy to their business objectives, and map out short-, mid-, and long-term plans that meet the needs of both. Every step of the way, we emphasize the importance of maintaining investments in high-growth areas, while applying new rigor to measuring and tracking outcomes to ensure ongoing return on investment.
But we know that to help our clients face the challenges of a new era of uncertainty, we ourselves must also continue our own transformation and build new capabilities that will allow us to serve their evolving needs. That’s why at Wipro, we are doubling down on our investments across our strategic business lines, with specific focus on cloud, cyber, data and artificial intelligence (AI), and engineering.
In fact, that’s exactly why we invested $1 billion in AI and created our end-to-end ecosystem, Wipro ai360.
Moving forward, we know that advances in generative AI will impact every business, every industry, and every function.
While AI has long been used to automate repetitive work, the latest iterations of A.I. can exponentially increase productivity in cognitive and creative functions, such as sales and marketing, software development, human resources, and shared services, and many others. Some studies predict generative AI will deliver up to 40% productivity gains, allowing us to deliver better value to clients and create new venues for growth for our employees—and our business.
Yet, making AI work will require organizations to rethink their entire tech stacks and strategies.
AI will increasingly run on the cloud, leveraging the agility, flexibility, and scalability only afforded by cloud computing. Running large AI applications with the latest generative AI models will dramatically increase the required processing and computational power to a level only available in the cloud.
Organizations will need to decide which cloud environment — public, private, or hybrid — they will use to train and run their models, as well as where they will store their data and how they will access it to successfully implement their AI strategies. For many companies, this will require both establishing a solid data foundation and modernizing various data sets.
In addition to data enhancements, training and deploying AI models at scale will require new levels of capacity and, in most cases, technology investments. Even organizations that revert to on-premises, or partial on-premises, models will require investment to reconfigure new next-generation chip sets.
To make generative AI work responsibly and ethically, organizations will need to put in place new and more rigorous processes and governance models. Collecting and storing data in alignment with local privacy laws; cleansing and validating data; and structuring, standardizing, and securing data will be foundational in training the large language models that are the basis of generative AI.
Further, an AI-driven future will require us to rethink how we train, deploy, and develop talent. As the need for AI skills increases exponentially and potential job categories are disrupted, organizations will have to double down on employee training programs to ensure ongoing skilling and reskilling.
Our clients expect us to help them transform and adopt the technology solutions that future-proof their businesses. To stay ahead of these key advances in technology, we have made a series of bold bets to take our business forward in the next decade and beyond. We are walking the walk, working closely with our ecosystem of partners and deploying similar solutions internally, to create the Client Zero prototypes and solutions that our clients can then leverage for their own programs.
From investing in our consulting and solutioning capabilities to making strategic investments in promising startups and building an industry-leading cloud business to becoming one of the first technology services companies to commit $1 billion to AI, we are focused on shaping the future of technology and helping our clients unlock new growth opportunities.
As we keep telling ourselves and our clients, the speed of change is only going to accelerate from here on. While the macro headwinds are slowing decision-making across industries, it is our responsibility as business leaders to continue to make the bold decisions that will be foundational to future success.
