How L&T is engineering an AI-driven conglomerate
BENGALURU : Most buildings across the campuses of the $25-billion Larsen and Toubro Group (L&T) in India resemble those of any typical engineering and construction company. But here's where much of the similarity ends. When you drive into the Chennai campus that is the digital hub of L&T, for instance, the person you're meeting would already know that you have arrived, thanks to automated geofencing that monitors your location.
This is just one example of how India's largest engineering and infrastructure conglomerate has been using digital technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, geofencing, internet of things (IoT) devices, drones, robotic process automation, and even augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) tools to keep a hawk eye on its assets across the country. These tools are all aimed at reducing waste and pilferage while increasing productivity and growth of L&T’s low-margin businesses. "Digitalization is certainly impacting our business, qualitatively and quantitatively, tangibly, and intangibly," said S.N.
Subrahmanyan, who became the group's chairman and managing director on 1 October 2023 after A.M. Naik stepped down from his non-executive chairman role. Digitalization “is empowering teams to predict better, improve productivity, reduce costs and wastage, make more informed decisions, enhance efficiencies, and deliver faster to customers," Subrahmanyan said in an interview with Mint.
L&T's digital journey broadly revolves around materials, machines, and people. For one, L&T’s command centre, which provides a one-stop dashboard for Subrahmanyan when doing reviews of the group’s leaders, is connected to about 14,000 devices (of a total of 30,000) on an IoT platform. This
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