AI is not plug & play, and not dramatic as it is being portrayed: C Vijayakumar, HCL Tech CEO

As IT stocks continued to drag Sensex with shares of Tech Mahindra and HCL Technologies tumbling over 6%, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services declining 3.91% and 3.79% respectively on Tuesday, HCL Tech CEO and MD C Vijayakumar told that in the enterprise context and given how complex the enterprise landscapes are, artificial intelligence currently is not a plug-and-play for AI and that's really where probably something that is being missed in terms market understanding of the impact of AI .

With one of the oldest global IT company IBM’s stocks seeing the worst single day fall after Anthropic announced its COBOL modernisation tool, weighing in on whether the opportunity for legacy software modernisation is being overstated, CVK said that what is being feared is that easy.

“The volume of modernisation that needs to happen in mainframes and mainframes, have been there for 50 plus years and every large enterprise runs, so modernising mainframes is not so easy. While COBOL conversion can happen, that's still one part of the entire landscape, which is just the business logic. There are numerous tools, numerous integrations, and the logic of these integrations, the business logic itself is not known to a lot of people. So, it's not so straightforward” he said.

With the evolution of AI technology happening at a much faster pace than the enterprise adoption he added that while technology is irrefutably becoming much more powerful, its deployment part in the enterprises is not being understood enough.

“Today, there is a big lag between how fast the technology is evolving and how it is getting deployed in the enterprise, I think that's where the challenges are going to be. So it's going to take time. It's going to be a little, it's not as dramatic as what is being portrayed that the technology can achieve. But in the real world, there is so much legacy in every enterprise. I think that's where the journey is going to be a long journey,” CVK added.

For continued relevance in the AI era, and the need for reskilling the tech workforce, he added that engineers will have to become super users of AI.

“Today, if you're delivering an output of X, can they deliver 3-4X? How can AI enable that? And how can we train them to really become super users of AI? I think it's just very purposely we try and do it deliberately. I think it's going to happen. I think that it's an opportunity as well,” CVK said.