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TCS to train 25K staff on Azure, OpenAI Gen AI tools

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest software services company, on Thursday said it will train 25,000 engineers on generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools and services by AI research firm OpenAI, the makers of popular chatbot, ChatGPT.

The generative AI services will be hosted and provided on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, thus making this offering available to its clients.

Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.

TCS also launched a generative AI business offering, called TCS Generative AI Enterprise Adoption, which will offer deployments of OpenAI’s generative AI business tools via the Azure platform to businesses.

TCS said, in a statement, that the business unit will “help clients enhance customer experience, launch new business models, grow revenue, and enhance productivity.”

The launch of the Azure OpenAI business unit follows TCS’ partnership with Google Cloud on 22 May to launch generative AI business offerings based on Google’s cloud platform.

As conventional revenue streams such as the banking and financial services (BFS) sector go through slowdowns globally, IT services firms are increasingly looking at generative AI to augment their businesses.

An investor note by brokerage Motilal Oswal Financial Services on 23 June noted that generative AI “packs good long-term potential” for the IT services sector.

The note followed HCLTech’s 14 June presentation on generative AI by Kalyan Kumar, the company’s global chief technology officer (CTO), which detailed what use cases can companies gather out of the nascent technology domain.

More importantly, Ireland-headquartered multinational IT services firm Accenture’s chief executive, Julie Sweet, said in a post-earnings analyst call that the company won generative AI contracts worth $100 million from clients in the four months preceding June this year—in a bid to assure investors of the promise that the sector carries.

Innovation and engineering for both Microsoft and Google’s cloud-based generative AI offerings will be based out of the company’s technology innovation hubs in the US, Canada, The Netherlands and Japan—also known as TCS Pace Ports.

TCS also said that the company already has 50,000 employees trained in AI, but the latest batch of 25,000 employees will be specifically certified in Azure OpenAI skills, to cater to client demand in its new business unit.

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