Genpact: Genpact employees in smaller locations receive training on GenAI and data: CEO Kalra

Companies as Genetic Pact They have been working with artificial intelligence for over a decade, said BK Kalra, the new chief executive of India’s largest business process management firm Genpact. AI has a positive impact and opens up new prospects for the Gurgaon-based company, which started as a GE captive, as well as for the IT and IT-enabled services (ITeS) sector at large. Calra he told ET in an exclusive interview.

“I think AI and data or the AI ​​Generation is a transformation technology“There are many branches of AI and yes, general AI is one of the most recent. It democratises, most importantly, understanding and through understanding comes adoption. It democratises AI in a much more significant way than the other advances of the past, so it is certainly very transformative.”

The arrival of the generative AI wave has not only improved productivity, but has made customers much more interested in looking beyond and seeing what is being offered to them in solutions. Before, they would not look beyond as long as they were offered productivity, Kalra said.

“Typically, a number of us – and especially Genpact – work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies and a lot of leading global companies, and they all need to infuse this change with people who understand not just the technology, but also the domain,” Kalra said.

A granular understanding of the core operations of banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, finance and accounting, supply chain of CPG companies, etc., is needed to embed data and AI for businesses, he said.

At the same time, the problem of AI-induced hallucinations is a red line in the corporate world, where trust is the currency.

“If no meaningful results are published, companies’ trust can evaporate more quickly, and people like us, who are large-scale operators, take that trust-based AI to the production level in large companies,” Kalra said. Trust involves traceability of data, explainability of results returned by AI algorithms, and trustworthiness based on high degrees of privacy and security, he explained. These are the elements of genpact’s Responsible AI framework, and any solution implemented for clients first goes through a Responsible AI Board.

The pace of change in Gen AI technology is rapid and will continue to accelerate, Kalra noted, requiring investment in the partner ecosystem. While much of the innovation There is a lot more innovation happening within Genpact with partners, who are also rapidly investing in the technology, leveraging the solutions they are developing and contextualizing them for customers, Kalra said.

Internally, Genpact is also investing substantially in employee training.

Genpact employees in small cities like Jodhpur, Warangal and Madurai have also been trained in AI and data, Kalra said.

Kalra succeeded former chairman and CEO NV ‘Tiger’ Tyagarajan, who retired in February 2024. Kalra announced a sharper execution strategy for the company shortly after. The company reported its second-quarter earnings this month and saw its total revenue rise 6% year-over-year to $1.18 billion. Its net profit grew 5% year-over-year to $122 million.

The company, brimming with optimism, revised up its annual revenue guidance. It said it expects total annual revenue to be in the range of $4.65 billion to $4.7 billion, representing year-over-year growth of approximately 4.0% to 5.0%, as reported, versus the prior guidance of approximately 2.5% to 3.5%.

According to details from the second quarter earnings call, GenAI Bookings in the first half of 2024 are already up more than 10x compared to the full year of 2023, and over 95% of its GenAI bookings so far this year have been contracted on a non-full-time basis (i.e., they are outcome-focused). The company now has over 80 GenAI solutions in production environments with customers deployed or running.

Kalra noted that despite the rapid advances brought by GenAI, the role of humans remains relevant.

Genpact has around 130,000 employees worldwide, with 65-70% of them based in India. The company’s in-house training and upskilling platform, Genome, has clocked over 10 million training hours this year, Kalra said.

He added that more than 100,000 employees are actively learning about fundamental generative AI, with 70,000 having completed entry-level training, while 18,000 have completed more advanced work.

“As far as GenAI and AI are concerned, as we see it, it is a totally addressable market and a total value driver for contracts for us. We see that in our pipeline and in our conversations,” Kalra said.