AI continues to sweep through the business world.
As more businesses seek to integrate AI into their daily workflows, vendors across the technology sector are investing in AI solutions to offer their customers.
Go deeper with GlobalData
LTIMindtree is a subsidiary of Larsen & Toubro, which owns 69% of the company and was formed nearly 80 years ago by Danish engineers Henning Holck-Larsen and Søren Kristian Toubro after they travelled to India.
Moving forward, LTIMindtree recorded a $4.2bn in revenue in 2023 and has a workforce of more than 82,000 employees.
LTIMindtree’s executive vice president and chief business officer Srinivas Rao spoke to Verdict about the company’s AI strategy and aspirations.
“I think AI is an extremely important element of our future strategy,” began Rao, “in fact, we are investing between $40m-$50m dollars on building AI capability and offerings. We’ve launched some very differentiated AI platforms already.”
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By GlobalDataLTIMindtree’s Canvas AI is an AI insights software that aims to provide customers with faster software delivery and analysis.
“AI is a buzzword, but many companies are still struggling to really find a use case,” said Rao, “… [Canvas AI] is almost first of its kind because it’s designed to help the enterprise jumpstart and scale up their AI capabilities and focus more on kind of bolstering their business innovation and engineering productivity.”
Rao explained that LTIMindtree took a holistic view of AI, examining how AI can be used to bolster productivity and elevate business whilst minimising potential risks.
Part of this risk mitigation includes upskilling over 10,000 members of staff to safely use AI without compromising security. For Rao, upskilling this huge workforce is just one part of an all-round investment into AI technology.
“We’ve, in fact, created an internal platform, which is called Garuda,” he explained, “… it’s basically a platform that will help us enable the employees on the journey AI capabilities. It’s almost like a hub where different visitors can go and there’s lots of different blogs and research papers and self-learning toolkits and speaker videos.”
While Rao confirmed that LTIMindtree would be hiring experienced AI workers, he explained that it was important to upskill LTIMindtree’s existing workforce due to the ongoing development of AI.
“[AI is] still an evolving technology,” he said, “and it’s not like there are hundreds of people with that experience available in the market. I think our core emphasis is a lot more on how we enable the already talented workforce to adapt this as an additional skill set within their overall competencies.”
This upskilling will also include workshops for senior executives, Rao clarified.
“It’s about leadership and ensuring that everybody else has a certain level of understanding,” he stated.
Upskilling is also an indispensable part of creating safe and ethical AI.
“Upskilling and training the entire workforce is an extremely important element of what we are trying to do… whatever work we do there is a common understanding of both the potential benefits that [generative AI] brings but also the risk elements,” he says.
Rao explained that risk prevention and security are at the forefront of Canvas AI’s design.
“Canvas AI already effectively manages some of the proprietary and industry specific data focusing on ethical use, sustainability and privacy,” said Rao, “so we will make sure as these platforms evolve, the architecture supports us to take those elements into consideration.”
Alongside upskilling efforts, Rao explained that LTIMindtree harboured ambitions for fostering and empowering a diverse workforce. In the next four to five years LTIMindtree expects women to make up 40% of its workforce.
According to research and analysis company GlobalData, around 27% of companies they surveyed already reported a high adoption rate of AI into their workflows in 2024. By 2030, GlobalData anticipates the global AI market to be worth over $909bn.
Despite this rising interest and uptake of AI, only three percent of VC funded startups are female founded.
The inclusion of women in AI development is critical.
A white paper published by the UN’s International Labour Organisation suggests that women’s jobs may be at a higher risk of AI automation. This is largely due to the higher proportion of clerical and administrative positions that are held by women.
The UN also stated that while AI would not end the need for humans to work, it would transform the way in which people worked entirely.
Upskilling workers in AI and fostering diversity is not just about helping to promote the development of AI, but also about readying the workforce for labour in a post-AI job market.
“There is a significant amount of diversity and inclusion included as part of our strategy,” continued Rao, “so I just wanted to kind of just highlight that we are very excited. We think there is enormous potential.”
