HGS: Generative AI opportunity is where there is a labor shortage, says HGS CEO

To allay concerns that artificial intelligence could wipe out jobs, a senior executive at a global business process management company Hinduja Global Solutions He said that the opportunities for Generative AI They are found more in areas where there is a shortage of labour.

Giving examples of areas where productivity is lower due to labour shortage, Partha DeSarkar, MD & CEO, Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS), said: Conversational AI, loan processing, document processing and image recognition robots There are some areas where High performance GS He is making pilots for clients.

He said HGS is currently running 10 to 12 pilot projects and the company hopes to bring them to production by the end of this year.

“Even though the West is a consumer society, the level of customer service you encounter when you try to call or contact their customer service line is pretty poor. Calls that are put on hold for 15 or 20 minutes can drag on for even longer,” DeSarkar said.

“This experience is unique in North America. It’s simply because they don’t want to put the number of people that are required to service those volumes… They are expensive, so they don’t want to put people in because they would have to spend money. Whereas in India you will never find that. We have so many people.”

He added that AI “If conversational AI could be implemented, which could be implemented for those conversations that do not require human interaction, then that experience of being on hold for 10 or 15 minutes for routine queries would disappear.”

Similarly, GenAI can be used to process loans. “If you apply for a mortgage in the US, it will take one to two months to get approved. Even three months. But if you automate the processes using AI-powered automated document processing, it will be much faster.” As for client business, he said growth is coming from mid-market clients today, where decision cycles are smaller and faster. “They (mid-market companies) were not the first to adopt outsourcing. Most corporate clients were large. But now outsourcing is becoming more normative and we think it’s an easier market to address to try to get mid-market clients.” For HGS, mid-market companies are those with business between $500 million and $2 billion.

Asked about the company’s headcount reduction, which fell to 18,036 in the June quarter of FY25 from 18,335 in the fourth quarter of FY24, DeSarkar clarified that it was due to the seasonality of its business. In winter, he added, people shop more because there are holiday months, which is when shopping increases. This also leads to increased activity for HGS.

Earlier this month, HGS said it had tripled the growth of active users and customers of HGS Agent X, a first-of-its-kind end-to-end contact center accelerator that incorporates AI for intelligent experience management. It added that since its launch in 2022, HGS Agent X has improved the productivity, sales, and bottom line of more than 1,300 agents across a variety of industries worldwide.