NTT DATA aims to reskill all its employees in India to become AI-native developers, leveraging the country’s vast engineering talent pool to scale Gen AI capabilities globally, a company spokesperson has said.
It also intends to tailor its services to meet the country’s unique requirements for cost sensitivity and data sovereignty/confidentiality, according to another company spokesperson.
The global IT services company, which offshores engineering resources from India, currently employs over 40,000 individuals in the country.
“India is one of the most important countries for the future… we have more than 40,000 employees in India, and our plan is to reskill all of them in order to be… AI-native developers,” Carlos Galve, Head of the Global Generative AI Office, NTT DATA Corporation, told PTI.
The reskilling programme will focus on boosting productivity to support global projects.
“…the same number of people who can support, for example, 10 projects… can support 20 or 100 projects (in the future),” Kenji Motohashi, Head of the Global Generative AI Office, NTT DATA Group Corporation, said.
NTT DATA hosts a lot of Indian talent at its research and development centres located at its headquarters in Japan and in Silicon Valley, California, US.
When asked if the company plans to set up an R&D centre in India in the future, Sean Lawrence, NTT vice president and head of telco’s IOWN Development Office, replied in the negative.
“We haven’t expanded to many countries in terms of core fundamental R&D for NTT… We have no plans…,” Lawrence said.
“But in the future, it might be possible… similar to the software development centres in India,” Yosuke Aragane, VP of the IOWN Development Office at NTT, said.
Apart from transforming Indian talent into a high-capacity global delivery engine, the company highlighted that the Indian AI market demands a specialised approach, revolving around cost sensitivity and data confidentiality.
On cost sensitivity, Motohashi mentioned that its partner OpenAI is offering their services, including ChatGPT Enterprise, at a significantly lower cost, specifically for customers in India to remain competitive.
“…the demand (in India) is a little bit different from other countries… we should consider the cost and the price.
“So, for example, OpenAI had a specific price for the Indian market, like almost 70 per cent less than the other countries for the ChatGPT enterprise price. We can consider to support such a kind of reasonable price and the cost of reduction in India, rather than outside of India, for AI as well,” he said.
India also has an appetite for private, proprietary infrastructure to maintain data confidentiality, according to the Tokyo-based company’s spokesperson.
“Some clients in India want to have their own infrastructure rather than using the crowded environment in order to store the data confidentially,” Motohashi said.
Further, the spokespersons noted a positive regulatory environment in India compared to Europe, where over-regulation is “stopping the evolution of Europe in terms of the AI race”.
The company is actively focused on supporting the Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India.
“One of our biggest projects is to support the GCC for the customer,” Motohashi said.
“The Indian resources and the capability will become so important for us. Like, we can debug such Indian AI engineering resources to support the GCC in the client location.” Looking ahead, NTT DATA sees the Generative AI (GenAI) era as merely the beginning.
Galve pointed to the next technological evolution that will primarily impact the global data centres and talent infrastructure.
“The next wave of disruption will be quantum computing with photonics… (it) will push the AI to another level… In the next 5-10 years, we will be mainly speaking about artificial general intelligence and about incredible robotics, capacities,” he said.
Source: https://www.business-standard.com/