The time is scary and exciting for the industry, say IT leaders

Research firm McKinsey says 80 per cent of the incremental enterprise investment will be in digital technologies by 2020. Machines will also join the workforce.

The information technology sector is already seeing the start of the delinking of headcount and revenue growth.

 

This will add fewer people to the sector. The sector, on track to be a $225-billion behemoth by 2020, will add a million people less for the $100 billion it adds.

“The annuity business will go down. We will see a 20 per cent decline in maintenance and business process outsourcing annuity.

 

"Sales and marketing will go up by 30 per cent and research-and-development investment will go up by 15 per cent. More important, 50 per cent of the talent will have to be re-skilled to be relevant,” said Noshir Kaka, managing director (MD), McKinsey.

T K Kurien, chief executive officer (CEO) of Wipro, agreed with Kaka. He said, “We are in the midst of a perfect storm. You have technology changing, consumer changing and clients changing, too. You need resources who have completely different skill sets.”

Many acknowledged that perhaps it is time for the sector to revisit its business model. Kurien said all our processes were optimised for scale, but how do we optimise for speed? “We need an organisation within the organisation to address this,” he said.

“The age of machine intelligence is here. It is so real that the largest media company in the world is fielding 65,000 different incidences not by labour arbitrage but by cognitive agents. The Shell Oil and Gas trading platform has moved from human-based to cognitive agents,” said Chetan Dube, president and CEO,