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India’s business process management (BPM) industry is on the cusp of revolutionising with the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI).
K Krithivasan, chief executive officer and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services, the country’s largest and globally second-largest information technology (IT) services company, said that there would be a ‘minimal’ requirement for call centres due to the rapid adoption of AI.
“In an ideal scenario, if you ask me, there should be very few inbound call centres handling incoming calls at all. We are at a point where technology should be able to predict incoming calls and proactively address customer concerns," said Krithivasan in an interview with the Financial Times.
Meanwhile, the BPM industry has been growing faster than the IT services sector, which has been impacted by macroeconomic uncertainties.
While India is one of the largest players in the call centre business, many companies have shifted away from low-end voice-based services.
A sizeable portion of voice work has also moved to geographies like the Philippines.
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Even the industry, once referred to as BPO (business process outsourcing), was rebranded as BPM in 2012 to reflect the maturity in the services it offers.
Some key parameters of BPM industry
| BPM | 2023-24 | 2022-23 | Year-on-year |
| $48.9 billion | $47.3 billion | 3.38% | |
| BPM exports | $43.2 billion | BPM is developing specialised capabilities in data monetisation, harnessing Cloud-based AI and analytics and is expected to grow 2.7% in 2023-24. (Exports only) | |
| Domestic | $5.7 billion | $5.3 billion | 7.6% |
| IT services | |||
| $128.4 billion | $124.8 billion | 2.9% |
Total headcount (IT services + BPM & others): 5.43 million
