Technology services provider Genpact has overhauled its business strategy in the past year under CEO BK Kalra, who took over the top job in February 2024. A significant share of its investments and focus has gone into advanced technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), through new offerings, acquisition of AI-focused firms and hiring of specialised senior talent, chief technology officer (CTO) Sanjeev Vohra told Moneycontrol.
Originally known for its business process outsourcing (BPO) model, the company pivoted to technology services and consulting over a decade ago. Now, it is gearing up to take on other services giants with the unveiling of its GenpactNext Strategy.
“We have pivoted our strategy big time and call it GenpactNext strategy, where we are hugely investing in advanced technologies. AI is the biggest of the advanced technologies as you can assume but I would not say AI itself can change the world…,” Vohra said.
“You need to integrate AI into the workflow system. Hence, you need many technologies to make it work. You cannot make SAP and AI separate. It has to be blended, to make the workflow happen….”
Advanced technology has a big portion of AI but there are also other satellite technologies required to make AI help get the value on the process side. There are three levers including process, data and AI,” he said.
An Accenture veteran with over a two-decade long tenure with the IT giant, Vohra was hired by Genpact as the chief technology and innovation officer only last year to fuel the strategy pivot.
While the company is making big investments in advanced technologies, the focus has been on “adjacencies” that will boost its AI offerings. Genpact is exploring both inorganic growth through acquisitions and organic growth through niche top-level hiring to capture the AI opportunity.
In June, the company acquired XponentL Data to strengthen Genpact’s data processing capabilities as a part of its AI boost.
Genpact also launched AI Gigafactory in January, an AI accelerator designed to help enterprises scale AI solutions quickly from pilot to full-scale production. Once data is prepared, it has pre-built AI models and agentic frameworks accelerate solution development.
Genpact is delivering more than 300 programmes, using more than a thousand prebuilt industry domain-specific algorithms and models. Vohra said the demand is driven by almost all the sectors the company is catering to. These include financial services, consumer goods, retail and manufacturing.
Last year, Genpact also launched Scout, its internal family of over 20 AI agents, enabling in-house employees to implement agentic AI in everyday work.
More than 50 percent of Genpact’s employees have used Scout, resulting in over 5 million interactions and a 90 percent returning user rate.
Hiring experienced talent
At a time when peers like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is in the process of laying off over 2 percent of its workforce, predominantly mid and senior level employees, Genpact said that it has hired over 100 executives in the same ranks over the past five months.
“We have had more than 100 executives joining us just in five months, and that will continue growing organically. We will be pushing organic growth for us especially for the builder community,” Vohra said. “We are hiring people who can build agents, the people who can build AI. These hires are at executive and leadership levels who can be the architects and the delivery leadership.”
In the gigafactory, Genpact aims to train more than 25,000 employees to serve at least 100 clients, expecting to generate next level of productivity gains.
Genpact wants all its employees to become AI practitioners over the next three years, he said.
AI a non-discretionary spend
Genpact’s pivot comes at a time when the larger IT services industry globally is facing macroeconomic uncertainty and growth slowdown, largely due to by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, forcing customers to cut back or watch discretionary spending under which tech budgets falls.
Vohra, however, is bullish. AI was considered discretionary spending back in 2015 but it has now shifted to becoming non-discretionary.
“We want to shift clients’ mindsets over AI. We have been shifting clients to think AI is non-discretionary by saying just like SAP has become a non-discretionary and you cannot say that we will not do SAP,” he said.
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