Avaya to add India staff strength by 20% over next year: Global CEO

Unified communications company Avaya is planning to increase its India workforce by 20 per cent over the next year, a top company official said.

The company has one-third of its global engineering workforce in India who are engaged in core development work, Avaya CEO Alan Masarek told PTI.

"In early summer, I said we will increase India's workforce by 20 per cent and we have already completed that hiring. In June, we had 1,200 employees in India and now we are at over 1,500.

"We will continue to grow by another 20 per cent over the next year... it will be across the board," he said.

The company is looking to hire data scientists and engineers specialised in artificial intelligence.

"Every one of three contact centre agents globally uses our solution. We have better and large amounts of data to train AI and have between outcomes," he said.

Avaya counts Airtel, State Bank of India (SBI), and the Government of India among its key customers in India. Its contact center solutions are used for the National Emergency Response Services (100, 112) and India's Aadhaar system.

Masarek said the market momentum in India is fueled by interest in AI-powered customer experience innovations and customers are demanding generative AI-powered solutions to reduce the operational cost of contact centres where the major component is salary of the agents.

"All our customers are asking for AI solutions. They say in the contact centre industry, salaries paid to agents in aggregate is a trillion dollars. It's the number one cost of the contact centre.

"All these elements that can make it a more effective solution. All of our customers are interested in this (AI)," Masarek said.

He said the AI-focused innovations are being driven by Avaya's R&D teams based in Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, and Gurugram.

Masarek, however, said he sees no short or medium-term impact on the contact centre agent jobs but has no visibility on long-term impact of AI as technology keeps evolving.

"My own view is that in the near to intermediate term, it (AI) will not reduce agent employment. I don't know the long term impact because the world is changing so quickly," he said.

To back his view, Masarek said when ATMs (Automated Teller Machines) first came onto the scene, people thought it was the end of a teller's job, but over time banks expanded their services and people were employed.

"Routine activities will be handled by a computer solution not requiring humans, while people will be engaged in roles that require empathy and involve complexity and nuance," he added.