Indian IT services firms take a divergent AI approach
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India’s largest IT services companies are divided when it comes to selling their AI solutions. Infosys Ltd and Tech Mahindra Ltd are building their own small AI models to help clients save costs, while Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, Wipro Ltd and HCL Technologies Ltd want to build on foundational AI tools that are already present in the market.
The size of an AI model depends on the data that is fed into them. Small AI models are trained on smaller data sets, whereas larger models, better known as large language models (LLMs), are trained on greater amounts of data. As small language models (SLMs) are trained on lesser data, they can perform lesser but more specialized functions compared with larger AI tools.
Most companies rely on internal data sets that are readily available to them, helping them build smaller models. India’s second-largest software services provider Infosys, which ended the previous fiscal with $18.6 billion in revenue, has been building small language models to service its clients. Also read | In charts: How India’s IT giants fared in their weakest quarter “In Generative AI, we have built four small language models for banking, IT operations, cyber security, and broadly for enterprises," said chief executive Salil Parekh in the company’s post-earnings press conference on 16 January.
The Bengaluru-based company’s management first mentioned this development in the company’s post-earnings interaction with media following its second quarter results in October last year. “The reason for the small language model, we believe, we have some very good data sets within Infosys. And we are taking some, let us call it, clean data sets from outside the industry and so on.
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