AI Summit: What cos must do for its workers amid global AI push? Wipro's Rishad Premji answers

Rishad Premji, executive chairman of Wipro, on Thursday outlined measures that enterprises can adopt to support workers as artificial intelligence increasingly enters the workplace while speaking at the AI Summit.

“India also has one of the largest and fastest growing pools of AI talent in the world. We are truly the AI and talent destination of the world. Approximately 650,000 professionals in India work in AI related roles today, and this number will double by 2027. This talent brings not only technical capability, but importantly, practical experience in applying technology in complex, real world environments,” said Premji.

“India is home, as many of us know, to the world's third largest technology startup base, including more than 4000 startups in the deep tech and AI space. Together, these companies are helping translate technological capability into practical, real world applications,” said Premji.


Premji added, “The constraint, as many have said, is not access to technology. The real world begins when AI is introduced into large real world organizations in those environments, technology has evolved over many years. Application landscapes are complex, data is fragmented, workflows are siloed. Processes vary across geography, business units and regular regulatory regimes. Decision making is rarely uniform.”

"Making AI work in this environment means modernizing legacy architecture. It means curating and labeling data to create highly specialized context aware models. It means orchestrating across agents in ways that are reliable and secure, and it means earning the confidence of security teams, risk leaders, regulators, and critically, the people who are expected to use these systems every day,” stated Premji. “This is where a more practical pattern has emerged in enterprise models designed for specific processes or decisions that tend to deliver the most reliable results. When AI is closely aligned to a defined workflow, it becomes more predictable, easier to govern, and more effective over time.”

"What enterprises need today is not a model that does everything, but the right thing consistently inside how work actually happens.

“But technology alignment alone is not enough for these systems to deliver value in organizations. Organizations themselves will have to invest in change, taking people truly along, helping them adapt to new ways of working, redesigning roles and decision making and building confidence in how AI is used," said Premji.

"That includes reskilling people, reskilling teams to work effectively with AI tools so that, so that they understand the outputs and exercise judgment where it matters most, when models are well aligned to workflows and people are supported through the transition. Ai becomes just not deployable, but it becomes sustainable at scale, and that plays directly to India strengths. We have decades of experience working inside complex enterprises, helping them modernize systems, manage risk and take people along through this change, and that works in environments like these. Is not just deployable, it is resilient, responsible and truly scalable," added Premji.