One Thing Today in Tech

In today’s episode, Yugal Joshi, a partner at Everest Group, a research and advisory company, talks about how the world of tech services is changing rapidly. The expectation is that what was manual and time-consuming yesterday should be codified and efficient today. Value is to be had at incrementally higher levels of abstraction and outcomes will matter much more than the tech under the hood. The broader message is that the days of sheer human driven tech services are fast numbered.

In this episode, Kamal Karanth, co-founder and CEO of Xpheno, a staffing firm in Bengaluru, explains the modest increase in open IT positions in recent times. Consider that in FY22, the IT sector alone hired some 2,30,000 people, net, according to the industry lobby Nasscom. That fell to 60,000 in FY23 and FY24 was about the same. Not much has changed yet for the IT giants, but non-tech companies rooted in India’s economy, as well as a new wave of global capability centres are hiring, Karanth says.

In this episode, Sumeet Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Leadership Boulevard, more popularly known as Leadschool, offers a quick update on the company’s latest product. Techbook, as they’re calling it, is actually a physical textbook, designed and engineered to comprise scannable pages that link up with an AR solution. This opens up a world of interactive content for students, and, alongside an AI-based reading assistant, makes learning a more personalized experience. Mehta hopes to put Techbooks in the hands of 4-5 million students by 2028.

Sridhar Vembu, co-founder and CEO of Zoho, offers a quick update on the AI investments at India’s biggest software products company. In an interview with Forbes India at the company’s annual user conference on Sep. 25, Vembu spoke about small models Zoho has commercialized, efforts to ensure enterprise customers’ security and privacy in putting such models to use across different functions and customers, and R&D aimed at ensuring reliability of the output from AI models. He also anticipates more energy efficient AI tech will emerge.

AI products and services will likely grow between 40 percent and 55 percent annually, potentially reaching $990 billion by 2027, the consultancy Bain & Company projects in its fifth annual global technology report. In this episode, David Crawford, a partner and chairman of the consultancy’s global technology practice, discusses some of the top takeaways from the report – including whether AI is actually delivering value, and the implications of the high cost of development of advanced AI.

In this episode, Sidu Ponnappa, co-founder and CEO of Realfast, unpacks the hype cycle, challenges and opportunities in ‘agentic AI.’ Realfast, a Singapore and Bengaluru startup, recently out of stealth mode, is initially offering AI assistants to Salesforce implementation services teams. In this quick chat, Ponnappa also talks about the intangible human experience that’s often discounted in conversations about AI, and offers his personal guesstimate on when we might see agents autonomously capable of building their own agents.

The leaders of the Quad nations, Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India, Anthony Albanese of Australia, and Kishida Fumio of Japan, and US President Joe Biden unveiled the Quad Cancer Moonshot, a collaborative effort in the Indo-Pacific region, in a statement called The Wilmington Declaration, on Sep. 21. This partnership will initially focus on cervical cancer, which the leaders note is a preventable disease that continues to affect many. The leaders also announced greater collaboration in critical technologies.

Is the enterprise opportunity on the rise in the world of augmented reality, or AR? Just this week, Microsoft, maker of HoloLens, has announced a partnership with Anduril, the US deep-tech defence startup founded by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus headset, now part of Meta, and Snap has released the latest version of its AR Spectacles. To understand the landscape better, we speak with Milind Manoj, co-founder and CEO of Pupilmesh, a head-mounted display systems deep-tech startup that’s part of MapMyIndia.

How satisfied are enterprise customers with the results of their outsourcing investments when it comes to generative AI? Mrinal Rai, assistant director and principal analyst at ISG, unpacks what the technology sourcing and advisory company’s customers are saying about this. Rai, who leads research for the future of work and enterprise customer experience at ISG, adds that irrespective of current challenges, and less-than-satisfactory results in some specific areas, large businesses plan to keep up their AI investments.

Microsoft has unveiled new AI features in its Copilot product. The features started rolling out this week and Microsoft also announced a large deal with Vodafone Group under which 68,000 or about two-thirds of the British mobile services provider’s employees will get licensed access to the new Copilot. Among the features are Copilot Pages, deeper integration of Copilot within Microsoft’s Office products, and Copilot agents, which will automate a growing number of business processes.