Wipro redeployed about 12,000 people in 2015, says CEO Abidali

Bengaluru: India's third largest IT firm Wipro on Thursday said it has redeployed about 12,000 people under Project NextGen in 2015.

"We started a lean kind of initiative in NextGen, which then matured into hyper automation, which is essentially through either robotic automation or our Wipro Holmes platform, which is AI and cognitive technologies," Wipro CEO Abidali Z Neemuchwala told reporters here.

"I have been giving an update every quarter.. So far, for the entire period last year we were able to redeploy about 12,000 people," he said.

A few sections of media had earlier reported that the bots took over jobs of 12,000 employees at Wipro last year.

Neemuchwala said, of the 1,00,000 people, 75,000 of them have been retrained, and out of which some of them are still working in technologies, which don't qualify within the digital part of the business.

On the reasons for company's utilisation going slightly down this quarter, he said, one of the reasons is release of senior level people through automation.

"When those senior people get released, the kind of skills they get trained in are also higher level, which means the programmes for those trainings are longer than the 12,000 people we released last year and retrained," he added.

On recruitment and redeployment, Neemuchwala said, the company continued to hire and has been providing new and redeployment opportunities to its employees that come in after reskilling them.

He said the company has deployed over 2,000 instances of Holmes bots across 175 customers bringing in significant improvement in efficiency of operations and customer experience.

The company is happy to report that in Q1 it generated productivity of 2,100 people in higher senior level and above bucket, he said.

The company has also integrated Wipro Holmes with customer's IT Services Management platform to provide up to 50 per cent auto resolution of tickets and 42 percent auto resolution in service requests, Neemuchwala added.