DIGITAL STRATEGY
AI GOES BIG Kumar , or KK as he is known , is a company veteran having served HCL Technologies and its subsidiary HCL Comnet since the turn of the millennium .
During this time , he has keenly observed the rise and commercialisation of AI both in India and now in the UK , noticing a ramp up in scale regarding the nature of AI projects being carried out by organisations of varying sizes .
This is reflected in HCL ’ s own service offering , structured around its principle Mode 1-2-3 strategy . This covers core IT operations and services ( Mode 1 ), next generation services to open up new growth areas such as data analytics , cloud , and IoT ( Mode 2 ), and products and platforms designed to futureproof entire business models ( Mode 3 ).
Mode 1-2-3 is enacted through a massive HCL ecosystem which leverages alliances with almost 150 of the world ’ s most prominent technology vendors , including the likes of Adobe , Cisco , AWS , GE , Microsoft and SAP . Its beneficiaries include industry heavyweights spanning manufacturing , financial services , healthcare , utilities and transport , projects which combine to generate revenues of $ 7.6bn a year .
For Kumar , something of a shift is occurring in that these tech projects , often surrounding AI , are going big . “ For the last few years , organisations have been doing a lot of small digital projects , Mode 2 projects like small cloud migrations .
“ Now the customers are wanting to do big bang , large-scale digital programmes . They want to do large-scale cloud migrations . They want to scale IoT into big-scale deployments . That needs the ability to take those concepts and scale it in a global model , and that ’ s what we ’ ve been focused on .”
THE HUMAN AND THE MACHINE Such upscaling has added fuel to the increasingly fiery debate on whether automation and AI implementation will result in human job displacement – a debate which Kumar is not shy of contributing his thoughts to .
“ My view on this is that AI will create a lot of new jobs ,” he says confidently . “ Yes , it will replace certain types of role which exist today because those skills are becoming stagnant , but whole new
34 May 2018