Wipro’s ambition to train its 250,000 strong workforce on generative AI shows its commitment towards leveraging the technology. In fact, Wipro established its generative AI practice over two years ago, according to Subha Tatavarti, chief technology officer at Wipro Limited. “For more than two years we have been engaged in research programmes with research institutes like AI Institute at University of South Carolina and IIT Patna, to build domain specific language models. These initiatives are helping our customers accelerate medical research and provide better medical care to patients,” she told AIM, in an exclusive interaction.

As an enterprise, Wipro has fully embraced generative AI and its potential impact on its business. The IT giant is engaged with several leading companies across a wide variety of industries to develop centres of excellence by leveraging its consulting expertise and also its foundational research knowledge through academia partnerships.

Besides, Tatavarti revealed that Wipro has developed its own fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) which sets them apart. “This allows us to leverage the rapid advancements made in foundation LLMs, while focussing our efforts on refining our models to remain versatile and future-proof.”

This unique approach allows Wipro to develop intellectual property (IP) that is not only robust and adaptable but also applicable across multiple domains. Tatavarti further revealed that Wipro will integrate Google Cloud’s full suite of generative AI products and services—including Vertex AI, Generative AI App Builder, and the Model Garden collection of foundation models—with its own AI intellectual property (IP), business accelerators, and pre-built industry solutions. 

“As part of the partnership, Wipro will build generative AI as a core solution within its extensive set of consulting services, which include digital marketing, customer experience, design thinking, and financial services, as well as within its global innovation labs (Lab45). Additionally, Wipro will leverage its crowdsourcing platform, Topcoder, to build and scale solutions that address client challenges,” said Tatavarti. 

How generative AI is benefitting Wipro’s customers?

Recently, the IT giant announced Wipro ai360, a holistic and AI-centric innovation ecosystem aimed at incorporating AI into all internal platforms, tools, and solutions. “Current client applications in the generative AI space tend to centre around a few key themes- cognitive chatbots, content creation and optimisation for marketing and media, automation in code generation and synthetic data generation,” said Tatavarti. 

Currently, the IT giant is already helping a chocolate manufacturer to produce more detailed and engaging product descriptions. In another example, Wipro is working with a European multinational telecom company to unlock value from data. “Wipro is also working with multiple vendor tools and software development kits to generate high quality synthetic data, which allows the client to increase cross-border collaboration and mitigate bias and eliminate distribution limitations that exist in real data,” said Tatavarti. 

Moreover, the Bengaluru-based IT giant is also leveraging generative AI internally. “The models being used in these processes are ones that are already available for enterprise use with enterprise grade security,” she added. 

GenAI Seed Accelerator programme

Over the years, Wipro has made strategic investments in many companies. According to Tatavarti, 2/3rd of these investments have been in AI. Going forward, Wipro will only increase its investments in cutting-edge startups through Wipro Ventures. “Additionally, the company will launch a GenAI Seed Accelerator programme, which will identify the top 10 generative AI startups in Silicon Valley and Bangalore and provide them with the training needed to become enterprise ready.”

Addressing generative AI challenges

Today, not just Wipro, but almost all organisations in the world want to leverage generative AI. However, generative AI comes with its own set of challenges. “As we look to make generative AI a part of our daily lives at Wipro, we also recognize the risks that come with this technology. We have put in place several controls to help manage the risks that may arise through the use of generative AI.”

For example, Wipro has implemented a control framework that grants access to third-party generative AI tools on a need-to-know basis. For users who are into development of new generative AI solutions, etc, the IT giant has set up a dedicated ring-fenced Cloud native environment to build and train their LLMs. Moreover, Wipro is conducting training on responsible usage of generative AI tools, especially those that use enterprise and personal data, in line with our GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) guidelines. 

“We also have responsible usage of generative AI policy formulated for all our associates. We are engaged in building solutions for detecting hallucination and AI generated misinformation. Some of the efforts in this initiative include creating large annotated multimodal datasets, developing novel entailment and diffusion-based techniques for detection, and knowledge graph based explainable automated detection systems.”

Advocating for responsible use of AI 

Wipro has also formed an AI Council focused on establishing AI development and usage standards. The council’s efforts include defining ethical guidelines to address biassed algorithms, ensure fairness, and prevent discriminatory outcomes. “Under our Chief Data Privacy Officer, we are also working towards setting the usage policies, including the do’s and the don’ts for AI Models. 

“We are looking at AI from a privacy point of view and prioritising data protection. We are working on ethical frameworks and regularly auditing AI systems for potential bias and fairness to promote responsible AI usage.” 

The IT giant is also reworking the processes to see how human and AI synergies can be tapped for intelligent automation. Tatavarti said Wipro is also keeping a close eye on the evolving regulatory frameworks across geographies, including the EU Act on AI and the Japanese regulations focused on using publicly available data to benefit society versus the individual benefits of content owners. “We are beginning to formulate geo-based strategies accordingly.”

Benefits to Indian IT

It is not just Wipro, but most of the big and small IT services companies are jumping into the generative AI bandwagon. The industry stands to benefit from LLMs code generating abilities as well as in the areas of call centres. “We also see a wave of AI services, such as AI model training, AI model hosting and vertical-specific data preparation, emerge in the next 5 years, which will be critical in helping enterprises capitalise on the full potential of AI. 

In the long term, Tatavarti believes AI will disrupt every industry, and as a result, every business will eventually become an AI business with a specific vertical focus. “Some examples of industries that will gain emergence due to generative AI include precision medicine, precision agriculture, hyper personalised marketing.”

She believes these industries will be AI led. Moreover, other capabilities, which have been touted for a long time, will finally gain emergence due to the conversational abilities of generative AI, such as true smart buildings and smart homes.