Hire humble tech and domain experts

Infosys says it hired more than 19,000 fresh graduates in 2020-21. Nasscom, the industry body, has said that the top IT companies will hire 96,000 people. But three million relatively low-skilled business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs would be lost, thanks to automation. What shareholders want to hear is how many PhDs and domain specialists our IT giants plan to hire.

For, unless they move up the value chain, and fast, they would cease to have a reason to exist. Indian IT companies and BPOs at the higher end already use automation of processes to increase output per employee and cut down on their headcount. Increasingly sophisticated software, employing artificial intelligence, including machine learning, will soon replace much of the routing work the IT companies do.