We want a bigger role for India within the company: Capgemini's Aiman Ezzat

'India is well positioned to work on theories like connected products, intelligence supply chain, and others', said Ezzat

Aiman Ezzat, global chief executive officer (global CEO), Capgemini, does not mince words when it comes to India. For Capgemini, India has always been a crucial centre. With stellar 2021 results, in terms of revenue and profitability, Ezzat’s biggest concern now is talent and the need to have a razor-sharp focus for growth. In an interview with Shivani Shinde, he talks about trends in technology, sustainability, the next big bet and talent crunch. Edited excerpts:

Year 2021 has been a stellar one for you. Where do you see Capgemini over the next 2-3 years as an IT services player?

The potential for technology is huge. I refuse to be categorised as an IT services company anymore. IT services firms worked primarily with the CIO. Today, we work with heads of engineering and different heads of businesses, CMOs and so on. They don’t see us as an IT services firm because the capability we bring is a combination of IT, digital, engineering and creativity with business consulting and data science. The technology spectrum is just increasing, and hence, the question is not if there are opportunities in the market. It is like a candy store for technology players. The question is you have to choose which ones you're going to go after. You need focus, because if not, you'll be creating things every day everywhere. And that may not necessarily be very good for growth or profitability, because you need scale. From a tech point, beyond cloud and artificial intelligence (AI), I think there is an important part that is not getting as much focus as others like 5G and Edge. This is because as everything becomes intelligent, everything is going to get connected, and the connection is happening through 5G and Edge. Then, there is blockchain, which is becoming much more mature. Application of blockchain is going to become wider and it’s not just about cryptocurrency. We have started working on quantum computing and we have a quantum lab. When it comes to metaverse, we already have some building blocks in place with AR (augmented reality) & VR (virtual reality). But there is one area, which is not getting enough coverage. I think what will be critical for the future is synthetic biology because it’s the confluence of biology, engineering and IT.

Where do you see Capgemini in 2025?

In terms of maturity, I think sustainability will be significant. Sustainability is like digital now, lots of small projects. We have done over 190 projects in the last 2-3 years. We see a real pick-up in the market. We have come up with an architecture offering that looks at the road to net zero strategy, green IT, sustainable operations, monitoring and everything else. I think this would become a big business by 2025 for Capgemini, because there is a real value in terms of leveraging technology and data to be able to achieve environmental sustainability goals (ESG).

India has always been at the centre for Capgemini. How are you further leveraging it?

We want India to play a bigger role within the company because it is also a better way of attracting and retaining talent. India is well positioned to work on theories like connected products, intelligence supply chain, and others. We are also setting up industry platforms in India. For this, we have hired people from industries like life sciences, telecom and help set up these industry platforms. Three years back, I said we need to build a bigger base of account leaders in India. Initially, the idea was to have someone, who will head an entire account or be the voice of the client. But I also believe that since all our accounts have some presence in India and since they have a good visibility of what is happening, they will be in a better position to contribute to innovation and new ideas. Today, we have 100 India-focused account leaders who have the potential to become global account executives. The India account leaders have now become a school for creating global accounting executives.

Unlike many leaders, you see the ‘great resignation’ as an opportunity. Please elaborate.

The great thing is that there is a huge amount of demand for technology skills. The reality is that there is more demand than supply. Of course, we are building more. But we have to start thinking differently about the talent ecosystem. The employee profile has also changed. You will have employees who will come to work or work from home. But there are some people who want to be 100 per cent remote. If you ask them to come to the office, they may just leave. The challenge with them will be how as an organisation we socialise with them or build a culture with them. We need to reimagine how we work with them as location is no more important. There will be people on freelancing, part-time or we may even have to pull in an experienced project leader who had just retired. It has to be about managing the talent pool. Sometimes, when we hire, we reject people because they lack training or knowledge of some technology. Instead of saying an outright no, what if we say use our training platform, train yourselves for three months and we will re-evaluate you. We are looking into this, because with digital training, we can train a lot of people. Idea is to make the talent pool bigger. In India, we recently launched as an experiment a programme to rehire women candidates (especially ex-employees, who resigned in the last 3 years from Capgemini) with broad data skills. During this pilot, we saw that nearly 80 per cent of these women are willing to join Capgemini.

What are the top three challenges or concerns for you?

Talent is a big challenge. Second is focus, as I said, it’s like a candy store now. People need to be very focused in areas they need to play so that they don’t fail. The third one is really around, at least from my perspective, addressing the sustainability challenge for our clients. It’s really becoming important to move on this. We have a role to play because of our capabilities around technology.