All Wipro solutions will be AI-powered in 6 months: MD & CEO Delaporte

IT major Wipro is betting big on artificial intelligence (AI), and will be embedding AI into all its solutions and offerings in the next six months.

“In the next six months, 100 per cent of our solutions and offerings will be AI-embedded. This is what we call AI-first. Every practice, every service line, inside the organisation will be embedding AI into all the solutions we have,” Thierry Delaporte, chief executive officer (CEO) and managing director (MD), Wipro told Business Standard.

Wipro is seeing a significant uptick in the number of AI-led deals. For the July-September quarter of 2023-24 (Q2FY24), it signed large deals worth a total contract value (TCV) of $1.3 billion, the highest in 9 quarters. While the company did not specify what percentage of these deals are driven by AI, Delaporte said: “We have observed that between this quarter and the previous, the number of AI-led deals have doubled. It is still modest in volume. But the speed at which it is progressing is remarkable.”

Currently, Wipro is seeing rapid adoption of AI in sectors like healthcare, consumer, and financial services, with hi-tech and utilities following closely. 

Earlier this year, Wipro committed to invest $1 billion in advancing its AI capabilities over the next three years. It also launched Wipro ai360, an AI-first innovation ecosystem with the goal of integrating AI into every platform, every tool, and every solution used internally and offered to clients. In August, Wipro launched a new centre of excellence (CoE) on generative AI (GenAI) in partnership with IIT-Delhi. The CoE will serve as an R&D hub where the teams will jointly work on building innovative solutions using AI, machine learning, and other technologies.  

Wipro’s AI priorities are being driven at the CEO level. “I chair an AI council every week with about 10-12 members of the leadership team…this is where we are putting a lot of our investment, time, and effort, with our clients as well as our partners, to make sure we are transforming as an AI-powered organisation, quarter after quarter,” Delaporte said.

Wipro is charting a conscious strategy to become an AI-first company by training and skilling its employees. “We want our people to understand AI, to know how to use AI, and improve productivity. We want to train 100 per cent of our employees in AI. In just three months, we have trained 180,000 people in basic generative AI principles,” Delaporte said. “We have an ecosystem of about 55,000 AI practitioners across the organisation.”

Wipro is also taking an AI-led approach to advise its clients. Wipro’s consulting team has developed sector-specific offerings to help its clients develop their own AI strategy. “Today, we have teams that are going to clients every day, and helping them find their way. Every client wants to engage with us on this topic but they don't necessarily know where to start and make the difference between the hype and reality. We help them with that,” Delaporte said.

Over the last two months, Wipro has launched various AI programmes within the organisation. “We want to be client zero on a lot of the solutions we are pushing to our clients…whether it is our finance team, HR team, marketing team, sales team, or legal team, they are all driving our AI programmes. An example is the employees’ background check, which took weeks earlier, now has been reduced to a day,” he added.