Pandemic led to structural changes across industries: Wipro's Rishad Premji

Says WFH is becoming the new normal; doesn't foresee having all employees all the time in the office, sees hybrid model of work taking over

The pandemic has resulted in structural changes across almost all industries, and challenged established ways of working, said Rishad Premji, chairman Wipro at the company's 75th Annual General Meeting. 

"Whether it is digital commerce, or telemedicine, technology-enabled businesses have emerged rapidly over the last 15 months, with Cloud technology becoming the cornerstone of this transformation," he said while addressing the shareholders.

Speaking on the changing nature of work and push for digitisation, he said: " As vaccination efforts ramp up globally, and economies start seeing a rebound, our customers are ever so keen to invest in and accelerate their digital transformation. Already we see new delivery models, such as ‘work from anywhere’ and Crowdsourcing’, become the mainstay. We expect virtual, remote, community based, and distributed work models to be the future of work."

“Work from home is becoming a new reality. We will likely never have all of our employees, all the time in the office and will learn to work in the hybrid model,” he said. But he also highlighted that with the rapid shift to digital, the demand for talent will outpace supply, and become a key dependency for growth. 

Wipro has so far vaccinated 35,000 employees at its campuses and over 50 per cent of its employees are vaccinated in India.

Talking about the need to reduce the rising socieconomic inequalities due to Covid-19, he said that the company's responsibility towards communities have gone up multifold. In April 2020, Wipro Ltd, Wipro Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. and Azim Premji Foundation, together committed Rs 1,125 crore ($150 million) towards tackling the unprecedented health and humanitarian crisis arising out of the Covid outbreak. "Over the past 12 months, we have supported more than 1,500 projects covering humanitarian aid, integrated healthcare support, and livelihood regeneration. We have reached out directly to more than 18 million people through our coordinated and comprehensive Covid-19 response, to provide humanitarian aid and support the creation of livelihoods for those affected," he added.

He further added that the company and foundations overall healthcare efforts have built capacity and run programs, closely collaborating with the public health system, to serve geographies that have a population of over 150 million people. "We are now supporting multiple state governments on the vaccination program, and the Foundation has committed an additional Rs 1,000 crore for this," he said.

While answering a shareholder on the company's M&A strategy and its focus on the startup ecosystem, Premji said that Wipro Ventures has invested $250 million in over 25 new age companies across the globe.

"We also look at some younger companies but we don’t buy younger companies but invest in them through Wipro Ventures," he added.