IT Services giant Wipro commits $1 billion in investment into AI

Companies across the world, from banks to big tech, have doubled down on investments in AI after ChatGPT, a Generative AI application such as ChatGPT, Bard, Stable Diffusion, and others have captured the imagination of people around the world.

Understanding its capacity to generate trillions of dollars in value across the economy the technology has sparked a formidable enthusiasm in the form of investments.

Now, Wipro, India's third-largest IT services company, has announced a significant investment plan of $1 billion that will train its entire workforce of 250,000 employees in artificial intelligence (AI) and integrate AI into its product offerings in the next 12 months.

The spending, over the next three years, also involves bringing 30,000 employees from cloud, data analytics, and consulting as well as developing new research and development together to embed the technology into all internal operations and solutions offered to clients to help them unlock new value through AI.

To promote continuous upskilling, Wipro will organize hackathons and challenges on its talent crowd platform, Topcoder. Additionally, the company will launch a GenAI Seed Accelerator program, which will provide select GenAI-focused startups with the training needed to become enterprise-ready.

This recent announcement from Wipro comes on the heels of a similar initiative by its rival, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). Just a week prior, TCS revealed its plan to train 25,000 engineers and help them obtain certification on Microsoft's Azure Open AI platform.

The parallel efforts of these two major Indian IT companies highlight the growing recognition of the importance of AI skills and certifications in the industry.