Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s second-largest company by market value, believes realising the full potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will require more time, although the global technology services major has begun to see sufficient traction in this revenue stream.

“Customers are actively seeking proof of concepts (POCs) to explore the efficiencies offered by Gen AI in application development, maintenance, and deployment automation,” Siva Ganesan, head, TCS’ AI.Cloud business unit, told ET. “However, realizing the full potential of Gen AI will require time, as enterprises and society grapple with various challenges.”

According to him, upskilling of the workforce, reimagining core business processes, focusing on return on investments and conforming to regulatory needs are some of the challenges that organisations face with GenAI.

To address these challenges, customers are focused on scaling out POCs and pilots while implementing necessary safeguards.

Given the importance of data sovereignty, cloud adoption is also seeing trends of it being set up in specific geographies as well, to cater to particular requirements.

For now, TCS is looking at the hybrid cloud model working not just on public cloud but also TCS’ own private cloud depending on customers to offer the right combination, the right flexibility of being local and private to ensure security of data.

With more cloud adoption becoming mainstream along with the GenAI momentum, last year TCS also announced the merger of its AI.Cloud unit.“It made sense to now start combining the capacity of the different clouds and start harnessing the power of the AI engine in a more consolidated manner. And I believe we are one of the first companies in the tech industry to do so,” Ganesan said.

Massive Upskilling Effort

The Tata group company, also India’s IT bellwether, has already trained 350,000 employees, more than half its workforce, in GenAI skills.

From a customer point of view, Ganesan sees patterns in the economics of cloud computing, making sure it is well designed and engineered, so that clients can take advantage of the cloud, and at the same time get the maximum return on investment (ROI).

“Second, if you look at the regulated industries, probably regulated parts of the value chain of industries, they want to be that much more careful in adoption, so that all the conformance to the regulations out there are adhered to,” he further said.

TCS is currently partnering with the three cloud giants and hyperscalers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google – helping it build new use cases with a focus on optimising costs for clients.

“More and more companies are looking at taking advantage of applications infrastructure…And we are building on the heritage that we already had with each of the three cloud players. What is also accelerating is the move for data to move to the cloud, because data is fuel for AI,” said Ganesan, who previously led TCS’ Microsoft business unit along with its travel, transportation and hospitality business unit and the assurance services unit.

Over the last four or five years, while there is a lot of demand for moving data on cloud, Ganesan believes there is a lot of cloud work yet to happen in the market, across different industries.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s second-largest company by market value, believes realising the full potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will require more time, although the global technology services major has begun to see sufficient traction in this revenue stream.

“Customers are actively seeking proof of concepts (POCs) to explore the efficiencies offered by Gen AI in application development, maintenance, and deployment automation,” Siva Ganesan, head, TCS’ AI.Cloud business unit, told ET. “However, realizing the full potential of Gen AI will require time, as enterprises and society grapple with various challenges.”

According to him, upskilling of the workforce, reimagining core business processes, focusing on return on investments and conforming to regulatory needs are some of the challenges that organisations face with GenAI.

To address these challenges, customers are focused on scaling out POCs and pilots while implementing necessary safeguards.

Given the importance of data sovereignty, cloud adoption is also seeing trends of it being set up in specific geographies as well, to cater to particular requirements.

For now, TCS is looking at the hybrid cloud model working not just on public cloud but also TCS’ own private cloud depending on customers to offer the right combination, the right flexibility of being local and private to ensure security of data.

With more cloud adoption becoming mainstream along with the GenAI momentum, last year TCS also announced the merger of its AI.Cloud unit.“It made sense to now start combining the capacity of the different clouds and start harnessing the power of the AI engine in a more consolidated manner. And I believe we are one of the first companies in the tech industry to do so,” Ganesan said.

Massive Upskilling Effort

The Tata group company, also India’s IT bellwether, has already trained 350,000 employees, more than half its workforce, in GenAI skills.

From a customer point of view, Ganesan sees patterns in the economics of cloud computing, making sure it is well designed and engineered, so that clients can take advantage of the cloud, and at the same time get the maximum return on investment (ROI).

“Second, if you look at the regulated industries, probably regulated parts of the value chain of industries, they want to be that much more careful in adoption, so that all the conformance to the regulations out there are adhered to,” he further said.

TCS is currently partnering with the three cloud giants and hyperscalers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google – helping it build new use cases with a focus on optimising costs for clients.

“More and more companies are looking at taking advantage of applications infrastructure…And we are building on the heritage that we already had with each of the three cloud players. What is also accelerating is the move for data to move to the cloud, because data is fuel for AI,” said Ganesan, who previously led TCS’ Microsoft business unit along with its travel, transportation and hospitality business unit and the assurance services unit.

Over the last four or five years, while there is a lot of demand for moving data on cloud, Ganesan believes there is a lot of cloud work yet to happen in the market, across different industries.