Wipro Unveils A Billion-Dollar AI Plan, Launches Wipro ai360

Wipro Ltd. has announced a multi-year, billion-dollar AI investment plan and a new AI-first innovation system, a day ahead of its first-quarter earnings.

India’s fourth largest IT services firm has committed to invest over the next three years $1 billion to advance its AI capabilities to help build new consulting capabilities, according to an exchange filing on Wednesday. That’s crucial, as its $1.45-billion Capco acquisition in 2020 is yet to show any material gains. Additionally, Wipro Ventures will invest in Generative AI-focused startups, as well as launch a seed accelerator program.

The spending also involves bringing 30,000 employees from cloud, data analytics, consulting and engineering teams together to embed the technology into all internal operations and solutions offered to clients. All Wipro employees—about 250,000 at last count—will be trained in AI fundamentals over the next 12 months.

All this will be made possible by Wipro ai360, an AI-first innovation ecosystem.

“With the emergence of Generative AI, we expect a fundamental shift up ahead, for all industries,” Thierry Delaporte, chief executive officer at Wipro, said in the statement. “This is exactly why Wipro’s ai360 ecosystem places responsible AI operations at the heart of all our AI work. It’s meant to empower our talent pool and be ubiquitous across all our operations and processes, as well as our solutioning for clients.”

Companies globally are adopting the technology to stay relevant, after OpenAI’s ChatGPT sent ripples across industries and helped democratise the capabilities of Generative AI. 

Just days ago, India’s  largest IT services company, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., said it will train 25,000 engineers on AI, while Infosys Ltd. has unveiled Topaz—an AI-first offering that delivers ready-to-use industry solutions to clients.