Avaya to focus on artificial intelligence, grow India talent by 20% in 1 yr

Avaya, a US-based customer experience solutions company, is expanding its India operations, as part of which it is looking to hire technology talent with strong skills in artificial intelligence (AI). Currently, it has 1,500 employees across five offices in India, including three development centres in Pune, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. Globally, it has a headcount of about 6,200 employees.  

"We will probably see a 20 per cent growth in hiring over the next year. And that's because the Indian market is an important sell-in market for us. We have a very large BPO base here, a very large government business, smart cities initiatives, all of which are principally running on our systems…then we have a large enterprise business. So, India is an important end market as well as an outsourcing market for the rest of the world. Some of our core development and strategy work happens here," said Alan Masarek, CEO of Avaya.

India is among the top 10 revenue-producing markets for Avaya. The other important and fast-growing markets in the Asia-Pacific region are Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Avaya counts Airtel, State Bank of India (SBI), and the government, among its key customers in India. Its contact centre solutions are used for the National Emergency Response Services (100, 112) and India's Aadhaar system.

A large part of the new hiring will be to strengthen its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. "We are hiring very actively in terms of AI engineers, data scientists, across our development centres in India and elsewhere. The impact of AI in the customer experience market is huge," Masarek told Business Standard.    

"Avaya is infusing AI into everything we do…We are very active on the university campuses to bring in those young engineers who understand contemporary development in AI. That's super important for us," Masarek said.

Avaya's growth in India is driven by segments like digital natives, e-commerce, banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), citizen services, and the small and medium enterprise (SME) segment.      

Globally, Avaya follows an "innovation without disruption" strategy to drive growth. "Innovation without disruption is built around the nature of our customers. Our customers are the largest deployments in the world. The largest businesses, government agencies, NGOs in the world, are buyers of our core businesses. They are modernising and our roadmap is driving that modernisation. It is about augmenting voice with chat, social, digital, and AI. While moving to the cloud, we ensure, it's not a rip and replace, but a migration," said Masarek.

As customers are increasingly turning towards ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies to increase process efficiencies, Masarek said they are seeking an integrator to bring it all together, and Avaya is well-positioned to play that role.