Decades later, there would be a case study done by management graduates on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the basic business model of IT companies. And Holmes AI from Wipro would be the benchmark to study such business transformation.
As per reports emerging, Wipro’s homegrown AI platform Holmes will soon automate jobs done by 10,000 engineers across 20,000 projects from various business verticals. This means that 10,000 highly skilled and paid engineers would become redundant as their tasks would be now done by codes and algorithms.
We had earlier reported that Holmes may replace 3300 engineers.
The current reports state that these engineers would be now re-skilled for other tasks. As of now, Wipro has already ‘freed’ 4000+ engineers, and reassigned their roles and profiles. It is not yet clear, as to how Wipro will manage to create non-automated work for these 10,000 engineers, who would be out of work by the end of 2016.
And, more importantly, how will re-skilling work for an engineer who has 5+ year of experience in a particular platform. Automation has certainly produced a lot of questions, but very answers.
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Wipro’s Biggest Automation Push Till Date: The Holmes Way
Wipro has 6 business verticals, which are internally called as strategic business units. Besides, there are five solution offering verticals. Right now, upper management from Wipro is assigning one industry leader to each of these business and service verticals for creating a smooth transition to automation using Holmes AI.
As per reports, the service offering verticals would be used for automating mundane maintenance tasks.
As per an unnamed employee from Wipro, such massive automation with the help of Holmes AI will serve two purposes: Cut costs as no longer an army of engineers would be required to do tasks which can be done by IA; and to change the very business model which Wipro used till date in order to generate revenues.
Due to such automation, tasks of around 10,000 engineers would be now completely automated.
Last month, Abidali Neemuchwala, CEO of Wipro had indirectly hinted at wide-scale automation, when he had said, “We announced internally in this quarter that we will have a more federated structure than running it from a central unit, which will further increase the pace (of adoption),”
Holmes AI Taking Large Steps Towards Complete Automation
Earlier, only low-scale tasks such as maintenance jobs, also called L0 were automated. However, Holmes AI is now automating complex programming and technical tasks, which earlier required human touch.
As per another official, tasks related with coding such as application development and software writing, which are internally known as L1 and L2 jobs, would also be automated by Holmes AI.
In fact, all the industry leaders assigned to the strategic business units and service verticals have been assigned ‘targets’, based on the extent of work which can be automated.
Wipro CEO Neemuchwala has already set a target of achieving $15 billion revenue by 2020, with an operating margin of 23% (last year, Wipro churned out revenues worth $7.3 billion with operating margin of 20.5%).
Advanced intelligence and precision of Holmes AI will certainly unleash a new era for Wipro, with better operating margin, better profits with lesser employees.
However, it also means that a lot of highly skilled employees would be made redundant by Holmes AI.