Internal groups at TCS fiddling around with ChatGPT, there is excitement: CEO Rajesh Gopinathan

TCS CEO Rajesh Gopinathan

ChatGPT is the flavour of the season and Tata Consultancy Services Chief Executive Officer Rajesh Gopinathan, too, has had a go at it and there is excitement surrounding it at TCS, he told Moneycontrol in an interview.

“I have personally gone in but I’ve stayed away from creating an account. The way I thought of it is, you're familiar with the parable of five blind men and an elephant—that everybody feels it. It's obviously big, but everybody describes it differently. I thought that there is no point in being the sixth blind man trying to figure it out. It's better to kind of step back, listen to what the five are saying and try to add a solution. But that's personally,” he said.

However, at TCS, he said that groups are internally fiddling around with the platform and are excited about it.

“There is also some pragmatism that code generation engines have also come in the past but this is bigger, better, faster. We need to see what is it good at, where is it going, and how can we integrate it into service delivery,” he added.

Gopinathan said the company’s lens is to think of it as a tool.

“…when automation started picking up, other tool sets came, our lens always is how do we think of it as a tool and integrate it into our service delivery, so that your Service Delivery always stays one layer above. The tool per se will keep on evolving. It will keep evolving faster than others. But if you keep positioning yourself one step above, by thinking, what can you use the tool for? You will always be in a good place, being a valuable partner. So to ChatGPT also, it's a similar kind of approach. But no further incremental insight,” he said.

When asked about what excites him about technology, Gopinathan said it was its diversity, the extent, the speed, and its continuously ever-renewing aspect.

ChatGPT is a chatbot which generates detailed, written text resembling human conversation and can remember earlier conversations for context. It can be asked follow-up questions, its premises can be challenged and it admits mistakes as well.

The chatbot, which has captured the public imagination and caught the fancy of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, can also be used to write some code and debug it as well.