AI will create new business opportunities, bring more productivity into IT services: ITC chief Sanjiv Puri

Over the past few days, there has been a massive sell-off in the shares of software services companies, amid concerns that rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) will have a huge impact on their businesses. However, Sanjiv Puri, Chairman and MD of the FMCG-to-IT conglomerate ITC, feels it’s an overreaction and stressed that technology has always created new opportunities.

“The reality is that technology, when applied correctly, has created a lot more value. It’s not been doomsday after that,” pointed Puri, who is also the chairman of ITC Infotech.

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He said IT is an enabler. There is a lot of hype around the disruption caused by AI and it was “fairly misplaced”.

He said questions were raised when ITC Infotech was started after 2000, right after the Y2K panic, but the industry has only expanded since.

“Technology tends to scare people. It is an important development, very useful. It will bring productivity into IT services. But at the same time, there is a lot of work IT services companies themselves need to do,” said Puri.

He pointed out that there were few enterprises that had basic data engineering in place. He stressed that AI will help address issues and problems that one may not have been able to solve earlier.

As an example, he pointed to the AI models that ITC, a large user of wheat in its FMCG business, built to determine how rising temperature was going to impact wheat at 10-year intervals till 2050. Based on that data, the company was looking to develop relevant solutions.

ITC runs a programme called ITCMAARS (Metamarket for advanced agriculture and rural services), an ecosystem that provides new-age agricultural solutions to farmers. This GenAI-based solution has made it easier to reach out to millions of farmers, where it would have been expensive to do a physical reach out.

Started a few years back, it has already reached 2.5 million farmers and the company aims to reach 10 million.

“We are seeing (AI) use cases across our value chain, use cases helping us increase efficiencies in our factories, supply chain... It is also opening newer business opportunities,” said Puri.

There have been several acquisitions in the consumer goods space in recent times. Puri said ITC had done a few last year. He added that it was a process the company constantly explored and it would invest, wherever it fit the strategic road map.