BENGALURU: TCS CEO K Krithivasan said that within a year, there would be a “minimal” requirement for call centres due to the rapid progress in AI technology.
“In an ideal phase, if you ask me, there should be very minimal incoming call centres having incoming calls at all,” Krithivasan told the Financial Times. He further explained, “We are in a situation where the technology should be able to predict a call coming and then proactively address the customer’s pain point,” he said.
Although no job cuts have been implemented so far, the adoption of generative AI could significantly transform customer support centres, which have traditionally provided employment to thousands of people.
Despite the potential for change, Krithivasan was against overestimating the immediate impact of generative AI. “The impact would be seen more long term than expecting to get the benefits in the next two to three quarters,” he told FT. Krithivasan also challenged the notion that generative AI would lead to an overall reduction in jobs, arguing that “the world is going to need more and more people, not fewer people, in terms of technology talent – and India has so many people.”
TCS’s AI and genAI pipeline has doubled to $900 million during the March quarter. In the recent earnings call, Krithivasan said he is gradually seeing a few gen AI use cases moving to production. “Gen AI’s ability to create new data and content is driving innovation across sectors. We expect wider adoption in the financial year 2025, with focus on seamless integration with current workflows with a ‘human-in-the-loop’ approach.”
Gen AI, he said, is steadfastly at the forefront of the technology trends and customers are on the lookout for POCs (proofs of concept) on the efficiencies that can be enabled by Gen AI in application development, application maintenance and deployment automation. “A full realization of Gen AI’s benefits will take time and enterprises and society still have considerable challenges to address. These include managing the risks inherent in Gen AI, reskilling and upskilling the workforce and reimagining core business processes. Customers are looking at scaling out POCs and pilots by implementing necessary guardrails,” Krithivasan said in the earnings call.