'IBM has prepared a 10-year roadmap to tap into the opportunities in AI'

'India plays a critical role in executing our hybrid Cloud and AI strategy,' says SANDIP PATEL, Managing Director, IBM India & South Asia

IBM’s laser-sharp focus on artificial intelligence (AI) has been evident ever since Arvind Krishna took charge of the American information technology (IT) giant. India plays a key role in this strategy, and the team is helping both Indian and global enterprises leverage the power of AI. SANDIP PATEL, managing director, IBM India & South Asia, talks about IBM’s AI strategy and India’s role in it in an email interview with Ayushman Baruah. Edited excerpts:

What is IBM’s overall strategy to tap into opportunities in AI?
 

With the democratisation of AI well underway, businesses are demanding accurate results they can trust, scaling AI across the organisation, and using AI models that can be easily adapted to specific use cases.

Our strategy for AI is designed keeping these needs in mind, enabling businesses to develop, tune, and deploy enterprise-ready and trustworthy AI more easily and at scale.

We understand where the AI market is headed and have prepared a 10-year road map to tap into the opportunities. Our recently launched Watsonx platform is a big step towards delivering on that vision.

To complement our AI products, IBM Consulting has deep technology and industry expertise to help clients navigate these challenges. We have also set up a Centre of Excellence for Generative AI (GenAI) with over 1,000 GenAI experts and plan to build a focused practice that will actively build and deploy Watsonx for clients. Finally, our partner ecosystem plays a critical role in the execution of our strategy.

What will be the India unit’s role in this strategy?
 

IBM India is a microcosm of IBM Global, and we play a critical role in executing our hybrid Cloud and AI strategy. Our teams in India are doing a lot of the work in helping Indian and global enterprises leverage AI.

We are solving business challenges for our clients, nurturing local talent, and promoting the responsible adoption of AI. This body of work is also being done in collaboration with our ecosystem partners, academic institutions, and government bodies.

India is extremely important for IBM from an innovation perspective as well. Today, our three laboratories (labs) in India — IBM Research India, IBM India Software Lab, and IBM Systems Development Lab — are closely aligned with our strategy, and their pioneering work in AI, hybrid Cloud, cybersecurity, sustainability, and automation is integrated into IBM products, solutions, and services. And we are continuing to expand these labs in India, including in emerging cities.

For instance, the India Software Lab is a key contributor towards building the components of the Watsonx platform and its use cases.

How has the adoption of AI and automation within IBM helped the company?
 

We consider ourselves as client zero for many of our products and services. This ensures that we test the efficacy of what we create and build use cases that our clients can replicate and benefit from.

Take, for instance, our AskHR conversational AI, which automates more than 80 common human resource (HR) processes. It has been adopted across the company, saving the HR department, IBM employees, and managers a significant amount of time spent completing or supporting HR processes — allowing them to focus on more value-creating tasks.

We are using our automation product, Turbonomic, at the IBM Hursley data centre to conserve power use across 4,500 physical systems without compromising on performance to achieve our carbon-neutral goals.

Recently, IBM acquired Cloud software company Apptio for $4.6 billion. What was the idea behind it?
 

Apptio provides tools that help companies in managing costs and optimise planning across hybrid and multi-Cloud environments. This makes it the natural progression to our automation strategy — a combination of Apptio and our suite of automation tools like Turbonomic, Instana, and AIOps will give our clients a business management platform for the entire technology landscape.

As India moves and leaps swiftly on the trajectory of digital acceleration, the complexities and IT spending are bound to go up.

With IBM and Apptio, our clients now have access to IT spend data of over $450 billion — nearly half of the IT market — to manage and benchmark their IT spending. Together, we bring data-driven insights on the spend and then enable them to make data-informed decisions around investment planning.

Are you seeing a cut in IT budgets or a slowdown in decision-making from clients?
 

While we do see some of our clients being cautious about their spending, technology is a strong deflationary force in the current economic scenario. Since it provides a strong lever to drive efficiency and productivity, I believe businesses will continue to invest in their digital transformation projects.

A recent report by Gartner supports this view, forecasting that IT spending among Indian businesses will grow 2.6 per cent in 2023.