AI in IT services and the diminishing correlation between people and growth
While non-IT business professionals in the middle of their careers face the most disruption from generative AI, professionals in the IT services sector and their employers are prepared for change
The introduction of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into any organisation spreads anxiety among the workforce, in much the same way outsourcing has done for many years.
IT services companies have been disrupting corporate IT departments for decades, whether it be through lift-and-shift outsourcing contracts, managed services or cloud-based arrangements.
Introducing an outsourced services partner brings disruption to in-house teams, often resulting in staffing cuts, transfers to suppliers and in-house employees taking on new roles.
Today, with the wider use of GenAI, suppliers and their staff are facing major changes to how they work. Technical and business staff alike will be affected as GenAI takes over some service delivery and basic software development, and automates business and operational tasks.
There will be a diminishing correlation between business growth and workforce growth at IT services firms. Traditionally, more people were required as more business was won, but AI is changing this. While mass redundancies are unlikely, as AI is expected to boost business, workforce growth is likely to reduce.
People businesses are changing
Take Indian IT services suppliers, for example, which have built business in the UK over the years by providing lower-cost labour.
India’s huge pool of skilled IT professionals, available at much lower costs than their counterparts in the western world, was the catalyst for the explosive growth of Indian IT giants such as Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, Infosys and HCLTech.
Hexaware, a Tier 2 Indian firm with 30,000 staff, presents an example of how things are changing. Amrinder Singh, head of EMEA at Hexaware, recently said the company has a self-imposed target for AI delivery. “One of the vision statements we have is that by 2030 we want nearly 50% of our work to be delivered, and revenue generated, through digital labour, not just human labour,” he said.
This, added Singh, does not mean the human workforce will be smaller. On the contrary, with the growth of the industry fuelled by AI projects, more staff will be needed. But he admitted the growth of the human workforce may slow down.
This view was echoed by HCLTech’s chief technology officer, Vijay Guntur, who told Computer Weekly that last year, the company’s business grew about 5%, with a 3% lower headcount. “For the next two years, we expect something similar to happen,” he added.
Retain and retrain
According to research by OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania, business roles that will be affected by GenAI include accountants, legal assistants and financial analysts. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs published figures in March 2023 that spoke of 300 million jobs being exposed to AI across all sectors.
There is no future for single-skilled people. Unless you are multi-skilled with domain understanding, as well as an understanding of how to use AI and technology, you will not survive
Amrinder Singh, Hexaware
Hexaware’s Singh voiced a warning: “There is no future for single-skilled people. Unless you are multi-skilled with domain understanding, as well as an understanding of how to use AI and technology, you will not survive,” he said.
Like workers in business roles, tech staff must retrain for a world with AI if they are to prosper.
Sam Kingston, CEO of software services company Zenitech and former UK head of EDS’s UK private sector business, said the role of a software developer is changing as GenAI sees wide adoption.
“Skills like critical thinking, creativity, communication and understanding user needs become even more crucial as AI handles more of the direct coding tasks,” he said. “AI assistants can provide explanations for code snippets, suggest relevant documentation and help developers understand unfamiliar codebases faster.”
He added: “We see AI not as a replacement for developers, but as a catalyst for human potential, enabling both technical and non-technical teams to build and learn faster. By retraining talent to collaborate with AI, we’re elevating roles and accelerating outcomes across the development lifecycle.”
Indian IT giant HCLTech has trained about 100,000 tech staff in the organisation to use AI tools in their day-to-day work. According to Guntur, who heads up the company’s AI work, it expects to “scale that up this year”.
The company splits learners into two groups: developers and users. “For developers, we have a set of comprehensive training modules spanning chip design to AI/GenAI modelling, as well as data science and engineering. For users, the focus is on fundamentals and using AI to be more efficient in their roles.”
Taking their own medicine
Suppliers are not only selling the advantages of AI in operations to customers, but are taking their own medicine. As in their customers’ operations, the use of GenAI will reduce the size of supplier workforces in the long term.
HCLTech, for example, is using AI to streamline its internal recruitment process, IT helpdesk and the task of putting together bids for business.
Its internal helpdesk has been AI-enabled to automatically route tickets to the right place to be resolved. A human only gets involved when required.
It is also using AI for hiring, a huge task for a company that recruits about 30,000 people every year, requiring a million CVs to be sifted.
The company built an AI system to scan CVs and score them according to their relevance to a job description. The interview process is also streamlined through AI, with the system providing interviewers with relevant questions to ask. “I no longer need a super knowledgeable person to do the first line of interviews because AI can help ask the right questions,” said HCLTech’s Gunter.
“The whole recruitment process was very manual and needed a lot of labour,” he added. “Now we can process more CVs on any given day, and we can process more people through interviews and the validation process. Before even coming to our technical people, we can filter out people who are not right for the job.”
AI is also assisting HCL in the business-critical role of responding to proposed opportunities.
“Customers have a lot of requests, either for information, through requests for information (RFIs), or requests for proposals (RFPs). A lot of the questions in these RFIs and RFPs are very common across many customers, so we’ve now built a system which can create these responses from past data,” said Gunter.
“Over many years, we have responded to many RFPs, and we’ve been able to comb through all that, and now we have well-articulated and well-composed AI responses.”
He said the response time is much better, and the quality of responses has improved and become less dependent on the specific person doing the job.
“There will, however, be nuances of that specific context for the customer asking, and that part is where people can be creative and focus on showing that customer-specific problem,” he added.
Read more about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)
