 "Venugopal Lambu")
Venugopal Lambu, chief executive officer (CEO) & MD of India’s sixth-largest IT services firm LTIMindtree, said the company’s ‘fit-for-future’ plan is already delivering results — evident in the first 100 days since he took over.
The highlights of this period include more than 10 town halls and over 7,000 in-person interactions with employees.
However, the most significant development, according to Lambu, has been the momentum in large deal wins.
Last month, the company announced it has signed a $450 million deal with an agribusiness customer. This is one of the largest deals bagged by the firm since the merger.
“Our fit-for-future plan is meeting its stated objectives. We are seeing significant traction in our large deals. In the last 100 days, the gross order inflow have improved, said Lambu in a virtual interaction with Business Standard.
After Lambu took over, he laid out a 100-day fit-for-future plan. It focused on increasing agility, simplifying processes and new baseline metrics for operational costs along with a pivot towards becoming an artificial intelligence (AI)-first company.
He also added that the fit-for-future programme is something that will continue.
“When we started, we had 10 projects or initiatives and six of them have met their scores. So I added three more…one of this is internal AI adoption. Yes, fit-for-future is delivering numbers for us,” he added.
A key pillar of Lambu’s strategy is accelerating AI adoption, marked by the launch of BlueVerse.
“BlueVerse allows us to infuse AI into our existing service line capabilities and at the same time also allows us to incubate AI for business process transformation. BlueVerse is an integrated AI ecosystem platform which will have pre-curated AI agents,” said Lambu.
He added that the recent $450 million deal win is the culmination of all the capabilities that the company has managed to bring forth. “We are seeing significant traction on our large deals,” he said.
Lambu had told Business Standard in an earlier interaction that vendor consolidation will be one of the key growth drivers this financial year as clients increase reliance on few providers for end-to-end solutions.
It had more than $3 billion deals in vendor consolidation in the pipeline out of its $6 billion order book at the end of March.
When asked if the current uncertainty in the macro economy is also impacting AI deals? Lambu added that the macro economic situation is changing a lot but that does not mean deals are off the table.
“These are the times when clients really need cost savings. They need to preserve cash…and AI gives that art of possibility. I do not see the conversations with clients slowing down. Especially on Mode-1 of AI which is about AI infusion into the IT services, the classical stack of services coming fast for us. This is either the part of renewal deals or adding a new scope to the work from other vendors,” he said.
Lambu, however, does agree that Mode-II — where there is business process transformation which requires multi-year transformation and change management within an organisation — is yet to happen.
He added that clients are still cautious on discretionary spends, but opportunities are available in areas where there is vendor consolidation.
