Mid-sized IT services companies lead AI charge with new investments

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As Artificial intelligence (AI) gains currency as a tool to help businesses improve their operations, India's mid-sized software service providers are jumping at the opportunities the new technology promises.

Mid-sized information technology (IT) companies, including LTIMindtree Ltd, Mphasis Ltd, and Persistent Systems Ltd, are investing in new-age technologies such as AI agents in order to make themselves future-ready by building AI capabilities and gaining market share in the new technology. These investment efforts by mid-cap software companies are in sharp contrast to their larger peers including Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, Infosys Ltd, HCL Technologies Ltd, and Wipro Ltd, which have so far looked at building AI technology in-house, staying away from investments in companies providing AI tools.

“Mid-cap software services companies do not have the training infrastructure that large IT services companies have. The larger IT service providers can build these AI capabilities organically because of their scale and the clients they work with, whereas the mid-sized software service providers may not have such capabilities and hence may have to go inorganic," said Pramod Gubbi, co-founder of Marcellus Investment Managers, a Mumbai-based investment management firm.

Last week, LTIMindtree agreed to invest up to $6 million in Voicing.AI, a US-headquartered, eight-months-old company specialising in providing human-like AI voice agents to customers, to help customers use AI tools in their customer engagement processes. “Our investment with Voicing.AI aims to redefine how businesses interact with their customers through intelligent automation and AI," said Debashis Chatterjee, chief executive