Rishad Premji, Executive Chairman, Wipro Limited in conversation with Sanjeev Krishan, Chairperson, PwC in India.
Sanjeev Krishan: India is trying to reposition itself by being a little bit more balanced in terms of its GDP, its huge focus on manufacturing and some of the new areas which have come in. How do you see this transition that India is trying to make, where it aims to achieve more balanced growth, both in the short term and in [moving towards] the Government of India’s Viksit Bharat agenda, which is a little bit long term. How do you see these two marrying each other?
Sanjeev Krishan (L) with Rishad Premji.
Rishad Premji: So first of all, Sanjeev, thank you for having me, it’s good to be here, good to have this chat. I am very bullish about the India story over the next 20–25 years. You can see that over the last couple of years, we have had a resilient economy, it has grown well last year at 8% plus, we will grow between 7–7.2% this year and if you look at next year as well, growth should be pretty good, probably the highest in the world. So in terms of our scale and size, we are growing well. [I] fully agree with you that we have got to think about how we create the right balance between the different components of agriculture, manufacturing and services – I think we are at 18% today. We have got to be purposeful if we want to get to that Viksit Bharat stage and think of ways to increase our manufacturing output. So they [India’s growth vectors] are very tightly coupled and I think the government is doing the right thing by being purposeful about how it encourages manufacturing on scale. The other thing is that we have got to think about job creation as a part of the manufacturing agenda. Our big challenge to get to being a developed economy is going to be inclusive growth. We need bigger participation of the workforce, because there is no way you are going to be able to grow otherwise. You will have to grow consistently if you want to be a developed economy by the next 23 years. To grow at that pace, you have to grow faster than the rate at which you are already growing and you have got to drive more inclusivity. So you have got to get more participation from men and particularly from women. You have to have an agenda that’s very oriented towards creating jobs and I think that’s going to be required in manufacturing as well as in other sectors.
Job creation is going to be absolutely central. The other thing that I think we are going to have to be very intentional and purposeful about is infrastructure and capex spend. If you think about it, over the last few years, a large chunk of the spend has been [on] public infrastructure, it has been government spend. I think that has to continue and accelerate, but you have got to have more inclusive private participation in capex and infrastructure spend as well, and that is going to be incredibly important if you aim to drive growth. The third thing I would say is a very systematic, strong focus on consumption. Today, if you really think about it in terms of the scale [of] consumption, it’s the 100 million, it’s the 150 [million], it’s the 200 million Indians that really consume on scale and that’s why you have this bifurcation at some level. You have the rural economy which has not done so well so far, which is now starting to see some stability. You have the urban economy, which is maybe seeing some pockets of slowdown, but you’re seeing huge premiumisation that has unfolded over the last several years. So, you have to drive a stronger inclusive agenda and [devise ways to] get to the next 100 million and the next 100 million and the next 100 million [consumers]. You have to drive inclusivity ultimately if you want to have a developed economy by 2047, a Viksit Bharat by 2047. You cannot rely on a small chunk of people to drive such disproportionate growth, to take that USD 2,500–3,000 GDP per capita to USD 18,000–20,000. But I’m very hopeful about our intent to drive some of these things to get there. You’ll have to think about a very systematic focus on livelihood creation within the rural ecosystem as well.
Sanjeev Krishan: Point taken, Rishad. I also agree with your point that the public sector has been spending a lot and that the private sector possibly has to get into the act. Now if you look at it, India has seen multiple disruptions and I suppose the global economy has too. How do we make sure that we continue to work at these disruptions by investing, involving the public sector where the profit motive obviously is important, and yet cater to some of the things that you just mentioned, like inclusiveness, to make sure that there is comprehensive growth? At this point, how do you see the chances of India being a beacon [to the world] or the one shining star, which, of course, we would all like us to be?
Rishad Premji: India has a unique place in the world, we’re the largest democratic country in the world which works, and it works on scale, right? And because you’re a democracy, you’ve got to take people along. I think India has two fundamental advantages which we can leverage dramatically in the world scenario. One, we’re probably the largest consumption economy that exists. So if you want to scale your businesses as European and American companies, you cannot not be in India ultimately. It is now going to be the economy to capture over the next 10, 15, 20 years. So you have to be very intentional and purposeful about being in India. That creates a huge opportunity, and I think we’re being quite thoughtful about how we’re allowing more and more of global players into the Indian system, we’re encouraging them to manufacture locally, source locally, develop locally, sell locally, etc. I think that creates a huge momentum for the country.
And the other huge advantage we have is the fact that we are and can truly continue to be the skill capital of the world. I find till COVID, people used to come to India because it was cheaper and they stayed for quality, at least in the tech industry.
And I found what changed during COVID is people came to India because that’s where the talent was and it happened to also be cheaper. So oftentimes when I’m talking to customers, they will say to us, ‘Don’t walk the corridors of New York and London, walk the corridors of Bangalore and Hyderabad, because that’s where we’re making our decisions.’ Global leaders are moving to India. They’re moving to India because that’s where they’re making their decisions and that’s where the pulse of their thinking is moving. And these are not only Indian expats that are moving back to India, these are global leaders that are moving to India, like they would move to any other location in the world as an opportunity of growth for themselves, but also because the wiring of the organisation is moving here. And so we’ve got to be very intentional about how we leverage both these advantages. One, that we’re a large consumption economy and two, we are the skill capital and we should maintain that. The government has been incredibly supportive on the skill agenda in particular.
Sanjeev Krishan: Turning to another topic, we have been talking about these disruptions (such as technological disruptions led by GenAI). Do you feel that some of these disruptions require us to relook at our business models in any significant way?
Rishad Premji: Things are changing, so the most dangerous thing to do is to have fixated views. You have to have an ability to think constantly about what challenges your thinking, and be very, very systematically open to it. Speed is the second element; agility is incredibly important and I think the organisation that will win in the future will be the one that has this deep sense of agility and a deep mindset of learning to learn. You can’t pick a better industry that is going through change than the tech services industry, with everything that’s happening in AI and Gen AI. Now I’m a believer that any technological disruption creates value in our business model because our business model essentially involves providing solutions to customers and leveraging skills on scale.
Any new technological change requires skills on scale, so that creates a huge opportunity.
However, it will be a bumpy road for us. It will change the way you currently deliver work to customers. How do you leverage automation and AI significantly more, how do you recognise that certain tasks can be done by machines and you don’t need people? At the same time, how do you scale and rescale people so that they are able to leverage new opportunities which will have an impact on everything: From how you help a customer consistently modernise to move to the cloud, to have their data organised, enable them to leverage the data, to use models, to identify the right models, to fine-tune and train those models on your specific data set, to build use cases, to manage the use cases, etc.
That whole journey is a tremendous opportunity for the services companies, but it can perhaps create some bumpiness. The organisations that are able to pivot and recognise that some elements of their business will be less relevant, [make most of] the new opportunities that present themselves, I think, will win in the marketplace. The other thing in connection with AI which I think will be incredibly important is this mindset of responsibility: How do you ensure that you maintain privacy, elimination of bias and confidentiality? Because the minute you break that, organisations will panic, boards will panic and that can retard growth.
So in this case, the challenge to growth is not going to be the technology itself – the technology is moving ahead far faster than people’s ability to absorb it. It’s going to be these kinds of things – how do you have the right guardrails, what does the government do in terms of regulation, which will also have an implication on how quickly this can move. Then there’s change management – how do you take people along, how do you convince people that this is going to be an enabler, an augmenter to your job, that it’s not going to be something that takes away your job in all instances, but will make your job much better? So how you take people along by bringing about a change in the mindset is going to be incredibly important.
Gone are the days of thinking of jobs in terms of titles and roles. Whether we’re the chairman, the CEO or somebody joining from campus, all of our jobs have tasks, and you’ve got to think of your job not in roles and titles, but in tasks. There will be some tasks that you can eliminate and automate, that can be done much faster, better by a machine, but there’ll be some elements of your jobs comprising tasks that will not go away. So the jobs that have enough of tasks that require your involvement won’t disappear and will stay and get augmented by technology, but there’ll be some jobs where 90% of tasks can be eliminated and will be replaced. Our responsibility as companies and as societies and as governments is to reskill those people, to take them along, because that’s our duty. We have to help people reskill, but we also provide this mindset that you have to learn to learn and that you have to have the agility to reskill as well.
Sanjeev Krishan: I think you touched upon multiple things. I’m not necessarily a tech person, but people would say that the metaverse and blockchain didn’t really work due to lack of sufficient use cases, but GenAI seems poised to disrupt everything that’s going to come our way. Do you really believe in GenAI?
Rishad Premji: I think it [GenAI] is the most profound technological change that most people have lived through. What differentiates this technological change is the speed at which it is moving. Unlike other technological changes in the past, it’s the intensity of its speed [that sets it apart]. I think it will still go through a wave of adoption, though I think enterprises will still take enough time to adopt it on scale. We’re seeing more and more use cases moving from pilot to production, but the scale of production is still picking up [pace] in large organisations. I’m a huge believer [in GenAI adoption] and I’ll give you a couple of examples of how [we leverage it]. As a company, we think about [GenAI adoption] in three big buckets. First, we think about how we can disrupt the way we deliver work to our customers. This involves delving deeper into how we can leverage technology more and more, how we can change our whole software development lifecycle, how we can change the way we work with agents in our operations business, in our end-user computing business and in our infrastructure support business. There’s a dramatic opportunity in any managed services project to leverage AI more impactfully. The second bucket is about how, as a large company, we leverage AI and GenAI to serve ourselves. Interestingly, many customers are interested in knowing what Wipro, a large company, is doing to disrupt operations.
I’ll give you two examples [of GenAI adoption at Wipro]. One: We’ve built a conversational agent which gives every Wipro employee access to a range of information within the Wipro ecosystem. Forget the cost efficiency it created, think of the delight it is creating for a demanding customer called the employee.
The second example [of GenAI adoption at Wipro] is we have something called a smart contract analyser. We signed 1,400 master service agreements (MSAs) and 22,000 statements of work (SOWs) with our customers, and each MSA was about three to four hundred pages. As few people are likely to read a 400-page MSA, we need to find ways to leverage GenAI to extract the relevant service level agreements (SLAs), identify the SLAs that may carry penalties or fines and highlight those upfront to the delivery manager. There are tonnes of opportunities to leverage GenAI smartly. So, the second bucket is about leveraging GenAI very intentionally to disrupt the way we deliver work. The third bucket is about leveraging AI very purposefully to craft domain-centric, vertical-specific, context-specific, industry-specific and customer-specific solutions. For example, in the financial services space, we have created an AI-powered tool to work as an assistant to financial advisors. So, it [embracing GenAI] is about disrupting your own work, how you deliver services and baking that into the future work, disrupting the way you serve yourself and creating context-specific, industry-specific and vertical-specific solutions. By transforming every platform, every process, every function in the organisation, you drive the mindset of AI. We have now trained about 240,000 people on GenAI 101, starting with me. We’re really driving an all-pervasive, all-in mindset on this opportunity around AI.
Sanjeev Krishan: At times in organisations, particularly in large ones, people are almost immune to change. They may not see a point in doing things differently and worry about losing control. Have you had any of those experiences or do you see that manifesting as technology makes it very open and transparent?
Rishad Premji: I always find that we think about change management as a one-way communication. I keep saying to people that it’s not about throwing the ball alone, it’s about making sure that someone is catching the ball at the other end, because the game is not in play if you’ve thrown the ball a hundred times, but nobody has caught it. Change management becomes oftentimes a one-way communication agenda. You put together some videos, some training [courses], you send a few emails out, maybe you have a few calls, etc. It's a continuous process, it’s not a one-time activity. So the one mindset we have to drive with urgency is how do we constantly bombard people with this need to get on the bus. I find that with any change, and especially with technological changes, you’ll have 10–20% of the people driving the bus and 10–15% in the back, who say ‘it’s another phase and this too shall pass’ and unfortunately, they will drop off. It’s the 60–70% of people in the middle that want to be on the bus, that need to be on the bus, that want help to be on the bus. These are the people that you have to help with change management. For example, we just built an AI-centric demand-supply exchange platform for skilling. Users can identify their skills, select learning pathways and spot jobs, along with the skills that they would need to be eligible for a particular job. We’re giving people tonnes of opportunities to skill, upskill and reskill.
Sanjeev Krishan: I’m sure we all had normative upskilling budgets, this is very important. You mentioned 240,000 employees, most of whom you have already trained in AI. How do you make these investment choices, is there a mantra you follow?
Rishad Premji: Our business is people, like your business is people. So you have no choice. If you’re not investing in your people, you’re not investing in your business. It is a necessity, to survive and thrive. It is all-pervasive inside the company. So, we are trying to set clear priorities and then put our investments around those priorities.
Sanjeev Krishan: If you look at GenAI, it is an energy guzzler. So how do we look at this paradox, where GenAI can cause significant efficiency but is also an energy guzzler?
Rishad Premji: We’ll have to figure it out. The one argument that certainly gets made is that energy consumption goes up multifold because of the use and consumption of GenAI, but hopefully GenAI can then find solutions to solve the energy challenge. So, we’ve got to be intentional about how and where we leverage it [GenAI]. In lots of use cases, I find enterprises experimenting with large language models when they can leverage smaller models, can leverage central processing units (CPUs) as opposed to graphics processing units (GPUs). So, being mindful of these choices can bring energy consumption down disruptively. At the same time, all of us as citizens and corporations must focus on our own energy journeys. We are very purposeful about our [Wipro’s] commitment to transform to net zero by 2040.
We’ve now got to 85% renewable energy in our campuses and we want to get to 100% by 2030, but we’ll get there faster, I think by 2026. It helps us dramatically reduce our scope 1 and scope 2 emissions. The big challenge is obviously going to be [reducing] scope 3 [emissions]. For that, we’re spending a lot of our time trying to find ways of working with our suppliers and making them more green as well.
Sanjeev Krishan: Do you think that the disruption that Indian entrepreneurship is causing is something that the world is taking adequate notice of?
Rishad Premji: I think our spirit of entrepreneurship is incredibly powerful. I’m a huge believer in the spirit of the Indian entrepreneur. Just look at the kinds of companies coming out of it [India’s startup landscape], look at the kind of talent that’s coming out of India and now running global organisations, acting as heads of engineering in large organisations — it’s all-pervasive . I am a big believer that the startup ecosystem can do for India what the services ecosystem did over the last 25 years in brand building, job creation and wealth creation. The biggest mindset shift that has occurred in India is being okay to fail and start again. Back in the day, it was taboo to have started something, failed and then shut it down. It’s almost a matter of pride today: I tried something, it didn’t work, I got up again and tried something else and it worked or didn’t work again the second time, but it worked the third time, the fourth time or the fifth time. So that’s a huge change in our psyche, which I think is showing up and further fuelling the entrepreneurial mindset. Look at what we’ve built with the digital public infrastructure. It’s unparalleled and unbelievable, having achieved the scale, speed and maturity unmatched anywhere in the world. Think about the limitless opportunities you can build on top of it.
Sanjeev Krishan: I’ll get to the last question and that’s about culture. We manifest and deal with so much change around us and we always want to do it well, make it wholesome and inclusive. For an organisation with such a rich legacy as yours, how do you ensure that the culture remains intact amid so many disruptions, even as you continue to grow and flourish?
Rishad Premji: First of all, I’m a big, deep believer that culture is infinitely more important than anything else, because it defines the tone, the smell of the organisation. The second thing I’m a big believer in is that all organisations have cultures, whether you’re implicit or explicit about it. Every organisation has a certain way of working, whether you’ve defined it or not. We are proud of the kind of organisation we are, what we stand for, our history and sense of purpose, our strong focus on wellness, on diversity, on learning, on giving back to the communities, on being responsible citizens with our sustainability focuses, etc. We are very purposeful about what we stand for, very proud of it as well, we want people to imbibe it, to know it, to learn it, to love it. So that’s in our chemistry. The big learning that I personally had five years ago when I took over this job was that many organisations talk about values, but people don’t experience our values, they experience our behaviours, and as a consequence, they interpret whether you live by your values or not.
For example, you can say you’re respectful to people, which most organisations do, but if you’re rude, use foul language or are abrasive, if you don’t listen to people, if you’re not inclusive, if you don’t give candid feedback in appraisals to people, you’re not demonstrating respect even though you say you’re respectful as a company. The beauty of behaviours is that you can control them. So I can be a mid-level employee in the company, I can be having an unpleasant experience with my boss, or my boss’s boss, or my peers, but I can still create a delightful experience for my team and that’s the beauty of behaviours. There are five habits that bring our values, which is the spirit of Wipro, to life every day. I’ve personally spent a lot of time communicating and emphasising the importance of these values.
The other equally important thing is to call things out, because when you don’t call something out, you implicitly communicate that it’s okay. When you allow a line to be crossed once, because you feel it’s so obvious or feel uncomfortable, the line becomes blurry and over time, it disappears. So calling things out is incredibly important and I realise how you call it out matters much more than what you call out. Once a leader does something, teams have to fall in line and it’s a journey, not a destination, it takes time.
Sanjeev Krishan: I think to ensure that everybody, including your employees, vendors and customers, has alignment and respect is something that defines an organisation and you certainly have delivered that and that’s why we look up to you. Thank you so much for your time, really appreciate this. Thank you.
Rishad Premji: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed this.
