India's IT sector must revamp biz, create own language models: HCLTech CEO

Indian IT firms need to rethink how they operate and the country needs to create its own language models as artificial intelligence technologies disrupt the sector, according to HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar.

The generative AI boom has threatened to disrupt business models for Indian IT companies that largely serve clients in the United States for operations support, providing software as a service.

"The underlying themes are not the same as cloud and digitisation and other things ... This is very different. The changes that AI is assuring are very different, and we need to be more proactive to even categorize our revenues to create completely new businesses," Vijayakumar said at an industry event in Mumbai.

Generative AI, which can write code for software among a plethora of tasks, is expected to speed up the timeline to develop products, improving efficiency of a company's workforce.

For an example, a five-year technology transformational programme valued at about $1 billion at a very large financial services firm could be done in three-and-a-half years, Vijayakumar said.

He also said India should build its own language models to cut down dependency on other countries and avoid impact from geopolitical issues.

Large language models are trained on massive amounts of data to generate text and other content.

"We should not assume that these (language) models will continue to be open source. I think these are going to be the coins on which the geopolitics is going to be played off," Vijayakumar said, adding that countries could limit some usage beyond their boundaries.

"To have a long-term competitive advantage, it makes a lot of sense to build and the costs are coming down. We need to find ways to very economically create a training infrastructure to train the models," he said.

IT industry executives also said the sector needs to avoid complacency to adapt and overcome challenges.

"I think we have to be paranoid. We have to be non-complacent. That is the way we can manage to keep up with what's going on in the industry," Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said.