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A company spokesperson said NTT DATA aims to re-skill all its employees in India to become AI-native developers, thereby leveraging the country’s vast engineering talent pool to enhance General AI capabilities globally.
According to another company spokesperson, it also intends to tailor its services to meet the country’s unique requirements for cost sensitivity and data sovereignty/privacy.
The global IT services company, which supplies engineering resources from India, currently employs over 40,000 individuals in the country.
“India is one of the most important countries for the future… We have over 40,000 employees in India and we plan to reskill them all to become AI-native developers,” Carlos Galve, head of NTT DATA Corporation’s Global Generative AI Office, told PTI.
The reskilling program will focus on increasing productivity to support global projects.
“…the same people who can support, for example, 10 projects…can support 20 or 100 projects (in the future),” said Kenji Motohashi, head of NTT Data Group Corporation’s Global Generative AI Office.
NTT DATA hosts a lot of Indian talent at its headquarters in Japan and its research and development centers located in Silicon Valley, California, USA.
When asked if the company plans to set up an R&D center in India in the future, Sean Lawrence, vice president of NTT and head of the telco’s IOWN development office, replied in the negative.
“In terms of core fundamental R&D for NTT, we have not expanded into many countries… We have no plans to…,” Lawrence said.
“But in the future, it may be possible…similar to software development centers in India,” said Yosuke Aragane, vice president of the IOWN development office at NTT.
Apart from transforming Indian talent into a high-potential global delivery engine, the company highlighted that the Indian AI market demands a specialized approach revolving around cost sensitivity and data privacy.
On cost sensitivity, Motohashi mentioned that its partner OpenAI is offering its services, including ChatGPT Enterprise, at significantly lower prices to customers, especially in India, to remain competitive.
“The demand (in India) is a little different from other countries… We should consider the cost and price,” he said.
“So, for example, OpenAI had a specific price for the Indian market, like around 70 percent lower than other countries for the ChatGPT enterprise price. We can also consider supporting such reasonable pricing and cut costs for AI in India rather than outside India.”
There is also an appetite for private, proprietary infrastructure to maintain data privacy in India, according to a spokesperson for the Tokyo-based company.
“Some customers in India want their own infrastructure rather than using a crowded environment to store data confidentially,” Motohashi said.
Furthermore, the spokespersons noted a positive regulatory environment in India compared to Europe, where over-regulation is “holding back Europe’s growth in terms of the AI race”.
The company is actively focusing on supporting Global Competence Centers (GCC) in India.
“One of our biggest projects is supporting GCC for the client,” Motohashi said.
“Indian resources and capabilities will become very important for us. As such, we can debug such Indian AI engineering resources to support GCC in the customer space.”
Looking ahead, NTT Data sees the Generative AI (GenAI) era as only beginning.
Galloway pointed to the next technological developments that will primarily impact global data centers and talent infrastructure.
He said, “The next wave of disruption will be quantum computing with photonics… (it) will take AI to another level… In the next 5-10 years, we will mainly talk about artificial general intelligence and incredible robotics, capabilities.”
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