Q & A
With K Ananth Krishnan, CTO & Harrick Vin, CTO Designate.
KAK: With all the geo-political tension and economic uncertainty in today’s world, companies need to respond quickly to events on the ground and cope with surprises, while staying focused on fulfilling customer needs and wants, with innovative products and services.
TCS helps them on both these fronts. We help build a future-ready, digital core that enables quick, insights-driven decision making. We transform IT and business operating models using technology, making them more efficient, agile and responsive, freeing up resources to support innovation. Partnering with us enables our clients to try out a larger number of innovative ideas quickly, and launch new products, services and business models to drive growth and transformation.
Innovate, Adapt, Thrive refers to how our scale, full services capability and innovation offerings enable our clients to respond to short-term challenges while accelerating their pursuit of longer-term aspirations.
HV: People often relate innovations to serendipitous discoveries. We help clients structure and scale the innovation process using the TCS Agile Innovation Cloud (AIC). This framework brings together the best of TCS’ talent, research and innovation inputs, global capabilities and ecosystem partnerships to scale up and speed up 'Ideas to Outcomes’.
For an insurance major, we worked with the client’s teams and collated actionable innovation ideas through a series of brainstorming workshops using the Clay Map. Leveraging our AIC, we rapidly built POCs every quarter, some of which got turned into MVPs and rolled out across the enterprise. In just eight months, dozens of innovation ideas were identified, and 24 progressed to become MVPs.
One reason for this high yield is that our teams leverage their contextual knowledge, learned over years spent immersed in the client’s IT and business landscape, to come up with ideas deeply rooted in that organization’s reality and therefore more likely to succeed.
KAK: We see interest in exploring use cases right across the enterprise. The most obvious areas are conversational systems, content creation and digital marketing, and activities which require processing of large amounts of unstructured data, text, images and higher-level abstraction.
Legal and procurement teams can use it to trawl through contracts to identify specific clauses, or prepare a summary of variations of a particular clause. HR could use it for handling employee queries. Sales and customer service want smart assistants that can explain product features and answer questions. In IT, generative AI can create basic code snippets or quality check developed code for adherence to standards.
These are just the initial ideas based on the standalone capabilities of generative AI. Over time, you will see newer use cases that are more combinatorial, driving greater spending by enterprises and expanding the opportunity significantly.
KAK: Software that writes software has been around for a long time. In fact, this is the 50th anniversary of TCS’ very first offshore development project, delivered using an in-house code generator. In the 80s, our TRDDC was famous for its tools foundry, which could generate custom code translators on demand, converting source code from any programming language to any other language.
TCS MasterCraft™ is today used by hundreds of our clients for developing, transforming and maintaining model-based applications. In fact, our award-winning product suite, TCS BaNCS™, is written and maintained using MasterCraft. Even though there is effort involved in defining the model up-front, clients see significant productivity benefits.
The new low code, no code platforms have done away even with those overheads. Their graphical drag and drop user interface empowers people with no coding knowledge to build sophisticated applications very quickly.
And yet, none of this has led to any demand compression. It has only led to more growth. We believe generative AI will be no different. Like prior breakthrough technologies, it will sharply bring down the effort per function point, driving up programmer productivity immensely. This will result in greater consumption, with volume growth more than making up for the effort deflation.
HV: The evidence is empirical. Every new generation of technology has led to reduction in programming effort per function point. But while that has steadily fallen, aggregate spending on IT services has only risen year after year, over decades.
Take for example, the switch from assembly language to C. Its compilers came with large, extensible libraries of reusable pre-defined procedures. A developer could invoke a procedure with one line of code in C and embed its entire logic in the code base, without actually coding all of it from scratch. Three lines of C accomplished what took 30 lines in assembly language. The 10x effort deflation didn’t result in mass layoffs of programmers. Instead, there was an explosion in software development because the same IT team could now build ten times as many function points.
Similarly, enterprises adopted offshore outsourcing, it led to a big cost deflation , but nobody’s IT budgets deflated. Instead, those savings went into building new systems and volumes rose to fill budgets and spending on IT services has only expanded. Likewise with low-code, no-code platforms.
KAK: With all the geo-political tension and economic uncertainty in today’s world, companies need to respond quickly to events on the ground and cope with surprises, while staying focused on fulfilling customer needs and wants, with innovative products and services.
TCS helps them on both these fronts. We help build a future-ready, digital core that enables quick, insights-driven decision making. We transform IT and business operating models using technology, making them more efficient, agile and responsive, freeing up resources to support innovation. Partnering with us enables our clients to try out a larger number of innovative ideas quickly, and launch new products, services and business models to drive growth and transformation.
Innovate, Adapt, Thrive refers to how our scale, full services capability and innovation offerings enable our clients to respond to short-term challenges while accelerating their pursuit of longer-term aspirations.
KAK: We have been leaders for a while, but perceptions can be too rooted in historic stereotypes to recognize the change. Back in 2008, when the term SaaS was still new, we had built a subscription-based, single instance, multi-tenant core banking platform using TCS BaNCS for small banks in India. A similar model is powering start-up banks in Israel today. The insurance platform launched in 2009, with shared services bundled in, went on to make us the market leader in life and pensions administration in the UK.
Historically, gaining leadership in IT services on any new technology required just training sufficient numbers of people in that technology, ahead of market demand. In the last decade, we not only did that at scale on the entire class of digital technologies, but also invested in higher order capabilities so we could advise our clients on how best to harness the combinatorial power of new technologies in their specific business context.
We scaled up our Research and Innovation, exploring use cases across different industries, creating solutions and showcasing them at our innovation centers. We expanded COIN, created new innovation frameworks and set up Pace Ports, our co-innovation hubs, across the world. Today, we not only have a large number of patents, but also the largest portfolio of products and platforms in our peer set, helping win large transformational engagements that uniquely distinguish us.
We are helping clients explore and develop end-to-end scenarios in combining technologies like quantum computing, generative AI, 5G and the emerging 6G, and new concepts in cyber security. Here in India, we have stitched together a fully indigenous network stack for 4G and 5G, a unique achievement that differentiates us from our global peers.
Elsewhere, we are pursuing 5G-enabled opportunities in operational technologies such as autonomous machines and remote operations. We are looking at emerging cross-industry ecosystem business models in sustainability and energy transition, which will be the big drivers of growth in the coming years.
HV: On the cloud, the biggest technology trend in recent years, we were one of the earliest to set up dedicated business units for each of the three leading hyperscaler clouds. Our early investments in building deep expertise and a large portfolio of innovative cloud-native solutions helped us capture tremendous growth and gain share.
We are today one of the largest partners – in some cases, the largest partner – to each of those providers, in terms of number of employees with certifications, volumes of workloads migrated to the cloud and in number of solutions and intellectual property on their platforms.
We are the launch partner for their latest offerings, whether it is AWS’ Mainframe Modernization, Finspace, and IoT Fleetwise offerings, or Azure’s Sustainability, Supply Chain Platform, and Financial Services and Retail Industry Cloud, and now for Google Cloud’s Generative AI solutions. If all this isn’t leadership, what is?
