B.K. KALRA GenAI WILL MAKE CREATIVITY MORE PRECIOUS

Change is difficult, but it also brings agility, says B.K. Kalra, president and CEO of global IT services company Genpact, referring to the disruption in businesses brought about by generative artificial intelligence. In an exclusive interview with Nishant, he gives details of Genpact's focus on becoming an Al-first company, its Al-assisted learning platform Genome, its strategy for growth in coming years and more. Edited excerpts:

How big a threat or an opportunity is ChatGPT, or applications like it, for Genpact and particularly for the Indian IT sector?

As we see it, it is a big opportunity. And, every big opportunity has its risks, so we will reflect on the risks as well. Not just for the IT sector, for the overall business world, for people, overall populace, it is an opportunity to advance. Hopefully in a few years, the coding language will change from Python to Fortran or to C++ to many others, to English, to Hindi, to Tamil. Therefore, think of elderly people somewhere who want certain applications based on the needs that they may have. They can get answers with far more ease, while behind the scenes, a lot of coding has happened.

So overall, it is a big opportunity for the business world.

Genpact has made investments in training the workforce in GenAI and developed its own GenAI platforms. Please tell us how exhaustive and resource-intensive the reskilling process is.

As we progress as an AI-first company, learning agility of our talent is one of the most vital attributes. We continue to invest in and integrate AI to reskill our employees. Genome, our AI-assisted scalable learning platform, offers over 600 granular skills in over 80 domains and learning across four major areas—digital and AI skills, professional skills, industry skills and service lines skills.

For instance, more than 80,000 employees are upskilling in GenAI via Genome. For the fourth consecutive year, our global workforce completed approximately 10 million training hours on Genome this year.