Will IT majors' AI investments push revenue per employee?

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ChatGPT became a big success. Big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Meta have upped their investments in AI, and companies across sectors are preparing for an AI disruption. For India's information technology (IT) services companies, this has two implications.

First, new business opportunities are opening up as their customers seek help rolling out AI projects. Second, AI is changing how software applications are created and maintained. LinkedIn, in its latest Future of Work report, said that software engineers had the highest share of skills that could be augmented by generative AI.

India's top five IT services companies have all said they are training their employees in AI. Tata Consultancy Services claims to have trained 25,000 of its employees in Microsoft's Azure Open AI, Infosys is training 40,000 employees on generative AI skills, and Wipro said it was spending $1 billion to train its entire staff on AI, and recently announced a new generative AI centre of excellence at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. All this is expected to boost the AI skill pool, which has been picking up over the last few years.

According to the LinkedIn report, the share of members in India who added AI skills to their profiles increased 14-fold over January 2016, the fourth highest rise in the world. The big question for IT companies is whether the AI skills diffusion, as LinkedIn calls it, will boost revenues and productivity. For Indian IT services companies, growth in revenues has always been accompanied by a proportional growth in employees.