On the 14th of September 2017, the Vinod Gupta School of Management had the privilege of hosting Mr. Ashwin Gaidhani, Senior Manager, CTO Themes at Wipro Limited under its newly launched guest lecture series Pratyaksh. After completing a program in Mechanical Engineering, Mr. Gaidhani went on to work with industry majors like General Electronics, Genpact, and Wipro. In his illustrious career of over 11 years, Mr. Gaidhani has worked extensively in areas like IT Service Management, Vendor Management, and Artificial Intelligence.
Mr. Gaidhani commenced his lecture by putting forth a brief history of Wipro. He shed light on how a company that started off with selling vegetable oil went on to become one of the largest IT service providers in the world. Wipro, a $7.7 billion company with over 1300 clients and a workforce of over 1.8 lakhs, now stands as a torchbearer of India's technological and intellectual prowess on the world stage. Mr. Gaidhani then went on to introduce the cutting-edge Wipro HOLMES - the artificial intelligence platform of the company. HOLMES stands for Heuristic Ontology Learning Machine and Experiential Systems and boasts of having onboard quite a few big names from the Fortune 500 list as its clients. It operates on the 3 E principle, i.e. it strives to be Efficient, Economical and believes in giving an unparalleled Experience to its users. HOLMES bundles a rich set of cognitive computing services that can be used to develop predictive systems, digital virtual assistants, speech and visual recognition systems and a host of other disruptive applications. Through HOLMES, Wipro focuses on providing its clients with automation solutions to accomplish complex tasks of different natures using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Mr. Gaidhani exhibited HOLME's capabilities when he mentioned as to how it was implemented recently to develop an eKYC application for one of the largest personal banks in the United States of America which increased its efficiency by nearly 40 %.HOLMES, an engine to crunch unstructured data can be used to provide a solution with or without a definite use-case. Amidst all the applications and usefulness of AI, Mr. Gaidhani admitted the need to be careful while building such powerful machines as there always existed a possibility of things going wrong and affecting a number of other dependent activities.
According to Mr. Gaidhani, the role of managers in the success of HOLMES cannot be overlooked. Four out of the six teams - Practice, Finance, HR, Strategic Marketing, Geo Sales, Engineering and Rollout - that constitute HOLMES need efficient managers to help the platform grow. According to the guest, managers, in fact, hold the key to convince the clients to adopt an AI solution and ride the wave of transformation. Talking about the inertia that AI faces, Mr. Gaidhani explained that the fear of the unknown will continue to lie within humans and one can only try to reduce it by exhibiting the applications and the wonders that AI is capable of bringing to fruition. Towards the end, Mr. Gaidhani asked the enthusiastic bunch of students to take a small quiz about the recent trends in AI and ended the session by motivating many to join HOLMES. He concluded with the hope that many managers from VGSoM will be a part of the Wipro HOLMES journey and play a role in steering this novel platform as it evolves to re-engineer the world. Thus we here at VGSoM look forward to more such opportunities of engagement and enrichment with personalities of the calibre of our esteemed guest Mr. Ashwin Gaidhani in times to come.