Wipro Infrastructure Engineering (WIN), industrial engineering division of billionaire Azim Premji’s Wipro group, is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) and the government’s manufacturing push to drive its $1-billion growth plans as it plans to accelerate its automation business, top executives said.

WIN has seen initial success in data analytics following the acquisition of Linecraft.ai about a year ago, which has helped its customers increase efficiencies in the 7%-15% range, Pratik Kumar, managing director and CEO of Wipro Enterprises, told ET.

WIN is a division of Wipro Enterprises.

Linecraft adds an IoT (internet of things) layer to its business and Kumar finds it as a significant opportunity from a differentiation standpoint.

“This has also pushed us to develop and build our own models to have our own forecasting mechanisms,” he said.

“We have been tracking our own projections and also customer projections, and there is almost a 92% accuracy. This makes you believe that this module with some refinements can actually work,” Kumar said, adding that this is helping WIN reduce costs and extend life of consumables, adjust inventory, and predict demand forecasts among others across its five businesses.

Founded four decades ago in 1976, WIN started with manufacturing and engineering expertise in the hydraulics business. It later expanded to industrial automation business now named as Wipro PARI (Precision Automation and Robotics India), Wipro Aerospace in precision manufacturing and landing gears, Wipro 3D, which does additive manufacturing in aerospace, space, defence, healthcare, and industrial solutions, and Wipro Water, providing wastewater treatment solutions for industries.Making several inorganic plays over the last three years, the Bengaluru-based firm has witnessed a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 30%.

Banking on its industrial automation business PARI, which it acquired three years ago, WIN aims to grow to $1 billion in revenues in the financial year ending March 2025 from an estimated $800 million in FY24, continuing to grow along with its inorganic bets.

Automation push
PARI, which acquired Pune-based Linecraft.ai in December 2022, constituted about 50% of WIN’s revenues in the just-concluded fiscal at about $400 million and has been growing at a 70% CAGR over the last three years with majority revenue coming from overseas. The unit itself has a goal to cross $1-billion-revenue mark in the next three years.

“We have provided customers between 7% and 15% throughput increase right after Linecraft application,” said Ranjit Date, co-CEO at PARI. “That’s effectively free money for the customer… By using the same equipment, same capex, same plants, a machine is now getting 15% more production.”

G Sundararaman, another co-CEO at PARI, said they are seeing huge growth coming from two key areas – electrical mobility in the automotive sector and warehousing logistics in the industrial automation space.

Having invested over $250 million already, Wipro PARI has also made three acquisitions – German automation systems company Wipro Hochrainer, manufacturing-focused AI solutions provider Linecraft.ai, and Italy-based Ferretto Warehouse Automation Solutions. It plans to grow its 3,000-strong workforce by another 800 automation professionals over the next year.

Date, who cofounded Linecraft in 2017 and brought it under PARI’s fold, said the conventional wisdom is true that data is power.

Presently, AI systems are using large sets of data to make them sensible and human interpretable, he said.

“Linecraft is a data analytics solution that captures the information from the machines at an element level with what action is being taken on the manufacturing floor real time and the system listening is to every action that is happening, building an operating model of the equipment from that data as to using machine learning techniques as to how the equipment is supposed to behave versus how it is behaving,” Date said.

According to him, aided by government support, manufacturing in India will see a huge transformation over the next 10 years with such technology in terms of how they take decisions, run their operations, optimise the project mix, and improve their responsiveness to changes. “All this will now be done, but not by the hardware and equipment, but the data and intelligence,” Date said.

Wipro Enterprises, with an annual revenue of $1.9 billion at present (as against Wipro Ltd’s $11.2 billion), houses some key businesses of the group – WIN, Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting, and two joint ventures, namely, Wipro Kawasaki Precision Machinery and Wipro GE Healthcare.

Wipro Infrastructure Engineering (WIN), industrial engineering division of billionaire Azim Premji’s Wipro group, is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) and the government’s manufacturing push to drive its $1-billion growth plans as it plans to accelerate its automation business, top executives said.

WIN has seen initial success in data analytics following the acquisition of Linecraft.ai about a year ago, which has helped its customers increase efficiencies in the 7%-15% range, Pratik Kumar, managing director and CEO of Wipro Enterprises, told ET.

WIN is a division of Wipro Enterprises.

Linecraft adds an IoT (internet of things) layer to its business and Kumar finds it as a significant opportunity from a differentiation standpoint.

“This has also pushed us to develop and build our own models to have our own forecasting mechanisms,” he said.

“We have been tracking our own projections and also customer projections, and there is almost a 92% accuracy. This makes you believe that this module with some refinements can actually work,” Kumar said, adding that this is helping WIN reduce costs and extend life of consumables, adjust inventory, and predict demand forecasts among others across its five businesses.

Founded four decades ago in 1976, WIN started with manufacturing and engineering expertise in the hydraulics business. It later expanded to industrial automation business now named as Wipro PARI (Precision Automation and Robotics India), Wipro Aerospace in precision manufacturing and landing gears, Wipro 3D, which does additive manufacturing in aerospace, space, defence, healthcare, and industrial solutions, and Wipro Water, providing wastewater treatment solutions for industries.Making several inorganic plays over the last three years, the Bengaluru-based firm has witnessed a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 30%.

Banking on its industrial automation business PARI, which it acquired three years ago, WIN aims to grow to $1 billion in revenues in the financial year ending March 2025 from an estimated $800 million in FY24, continuing to grow along with its inorganic bets.

Automation push
PARI, which acquired Pune-based Linecraft.ai in December 2022, constituted about 50% of WIN’s revenues in the just-concluded fiscal at about $400 million and has been growing at a 70% CAGR over the last three years with majority revenue coming from overseas. The unit itself has a goal to cross $1-billion-revenue mark in the next three years.

“We have provided customers between 7% and 15% throughput increase right after Linecraft application,” said Ranjit Date, co-CEO at PARI. “That’s effectively free money for the customer… By using the same equipment, same capex, same plants, a machine is now getting 15% more production.”

G Sundararaman, another co-CEO at PARI, said they are seeing huge growth coming from two key areas – electrical mobility in the automotive sector and warehousing logistics in the industrial automation space.

Having invested over $250 million already, Wipro PARI has also made three acquisitions – German automation systems company Wipro Hochrainer, manufacturing-focused AI solutions provider Linecraft.ai, and Italy-based Ferretto Warehouse Automation Solutions. It plans to grow its 3,000-strong workforce by another 800 automation professionals over the next year.

Date, who cofounded Linecraft in 2017 and brought it under PARI’s fold, said the conventional wisdom is true that data is power.

Presently, AI systems are using large sets of data to make them sensible and human interpretable, he said.

“Linecraft is a data analytics solution that captures the information from the machines at an element level with what action is being taken on the manufacturing floor real time and the system listening is to every action that is happening, building an operating model of the equipment from that data as to using machine learning techniques as to how the equipment is supposed to behave versus how it is behaving,” Date said.

According to him, aided by government support, manufacturing in India will see a huge transformation over the next 10 years with such technology in terms of how they take decisions, run their operations, optimise the project mix, and improve their responsiveness to changes. “All this will now be done, but not by the hardware and equipment, but the data and intelligence,” Date said.

Wipro Enterprises, with an annual revenue of $1.9 billion at present (as against Wipro Ltd’s $11.2 billion), houses some key businesses of the group – WIN, Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting, and two joint ventures, namely, Wipro Kawasaki Precision Machinery and Wipro GE Healthcare.