To deliver value in the AI age, organisations will have to invest in change: Wipro’s Executive Chairman Rishad Premji

As AI-led uncertainty shakes up IT services and consulting companies globally, raising questions about their relevance, Rishad Premji, Executive Chairman of Wipro , said India’s long-standing relationships with global enterprises uniquely position it in this transition. He added that organisations will need to invest in change to truly deliver value in the AI age.  

Delivering his address at the India Impact AI Summit, Premji said the constraint today is not access to technology but its real-world application, especially within large organisations. In the enterprise context, where technology has evolved over time, application landscapes are complex, data is fragmented, workflows are siloed across geographies, business units and regulatory regimes, and decision-making is rarely uniform. 

“Making AI work in this environment means modernising legacy architectures. It means curating and labelling data to create highly specialised and contextualised models. It means orchestrating across agents in ways that are reliable and secure, and earning confidence of security teams, risk leaders, regulators, and the people who are expected to use the systems every day,” Premji said. 

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Enterprise AI adoption gains from targeted deployment

For enterprise adoption pointed at the emerging pattern, he said, “In enterprise settings, models designed for specific processes or decisions tend to deliver the most reliable results. When AI is closely aligned to a defined workflow, it becomes more predictable, easier to govern, and more effective over time.”   

With AI technology evolving at an unprecedented pace, Premji called on organisations to invest in changing themselves to deliver value. “Taking people truly along, helping them adapt to new ways of working, redesigning roles and decision-making, and building confidence in how AI is used are critical. That includes reskilling individuals and teams to work effectively with AI tools, so they understand outputs and exercise judgement where it matters most. When models are aligned to workflows and people are supported through the transition, AI becomes not just deployable, but sustainable at scale, and that plays directly to India’s strength,” he said.  

Context and judgement critical in AI deployment: Premji

Arguing that India’s advantage in the AI age will come from developing talent at scale, Premji said the focus should not just be on training people in artificial intelligence, but on enabling them to apply AI with context and judgement. 

“That is why AI fluency should extend beyond engineers — to teachers, nurses, administrators, supervisors, and small business owners, among others. The dividing line will not be human versus machine; it will be between those who adapt and those who hesitate. Technology shifts inevitably create uncertainty, but for countries that act decisively, they also create opportunity. India has embraced such changes in the past, and I believe we are well positioned to do so again,” Premji said.