Changes under Wipro CEO Thierry Delaporte 'difficult but necessary': Rishad Premji

Bengaluru: The demand for talent will outpace supply and become a “key dependency” for growth as enterprises and sectors accelerate their digital adoption due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Wipro’s Chairman Rishad Premji.

Describing the changes the company has made in the last six months under new CEO Thierry Delaporte as “difficult but necessary”, Premji said that India’s third largest IT services provider was well positioned to leverage as well as enable such transformations.

“With the rapid shift to digital, the demand for talent will outpace supply, and become a key dependency for growth. Already we see new delivery models, such as ‘work from anywhere’ and ‘Crowdsourcing’, becoming the mainstay,” Premji told shareholders in Wipro’s annual report for fiscal 2020-21.


The company said it expects virtual, remote, community-based, and distributed work models to become the future of work, and said it has enabled over 97% of its more than 160,000 strong workforce in India to work remotely during the pandemic.

Premji added that as vaccination efforts ramp up globally, Wipro is seeing clients being keen to invest in digital transformation, which presents an opportunity for the company to serve customers. Moreover, technology is at the forefront of economic recovery.

“...whether it is digital commerce, online education, or telemedicine, technology-enabled business models have emerged across the board, with Cloud technology as the cornerstone of this transformation,” Premji said.

Commenting on the vaccination drives themselves, he said that now work to scale up the supply chain, build mechanisms for equitable distribution and efficient administration of life-saving vaccines must be done.

Premji said that Wipro had reached out directly to more than 18 million people through its coordinated and comprehensive Covid-19 response, supporting more than 1,500 projects for humanitarian aid, healthcare support and livelihood regeneration over the past one year since the pandemic started.

The company said it had taken up several efforts to keep its employees safe during the “ravaging” second wave of the pandemic that struck India, including setting up Covid care centres, partnering with hospitals across the country and also enabling vaccinations for employees at its campuses.