Indian IT opens AI labs across the world to showcase smarts

HCLTech announced this week that it is setting up an artificial intelligence/cloud native lab in Singapore that will be ready next year.

Singapore is the fifth country — after the US, UK, Germany and India — where the Noida-based company is setting up such a facility. The announcement comes days after India’s second largest software services provider, Infosys, collaborated with University of Cambridge to establish an AI lab in London, adding to over a dozen such centres it has globally.

IT companies such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and HCLTech to global majors like Accenture have been setting up AI labs from Japan to the Nordic countries to the Americas to showcase their AI and generative AI capabilities to existing and prospective clients. These facilities also allow the companies to work jointly with their clients to innovate new solutions, said industry experts.


“While existing clients can come, try and discuss their problem statements, they will also collaborate for proof of concepts in such labs after hearing from subject matter experts,” said Pareekh Jain, chief executive of engineering insight platform EIIRTrend. “The labs also help conceive new ideas and solutions. Newer and smaller clients would also come to evaluate their small pilots and take them to the production stage. Eventually, these labs would become a fertile ground where the seeds for many large IT deals would germinate in the days to come.”

Ireland-based Accenture opened a series of labs across the globe as part of its $3 billion data and AI investment announced last year. “Clients interested in pursuing commercial uses of generative AI will be able to visit the studios at Accenture Innovation Hubs in Chicago, Houston, New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Washington, DC,” the company said recently while launching its GenAI studios in North America.

TCS opened two studios, in Manila and Stockholm, in August to offer its customers in Asia Pacific and the Nordic region access to its innovation ecosystem. The studios are also meant for TCS to co-innovate with customers to meet their specific business needs. Earlier in May, it announced the creation of a Global Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence in Paris, adding to similar facilities in Amsterdam, London, New York, Pittsburgh, Toronto and Tokyo.

Cognizant, the US-based IT services firm where most of the employees are based out of India, in March announced the launch of an advanced AI lab in San Francisco that would focus on advancing the science and practice of AI through innovation and development of intellectual property and AI-enablement technologies.

Gaurav Parab, principal research analyst at NelsonHall, said these AI labs are building on the success of similar investments made by IT firms in recent years on the then emerging themes of cloud, IoT and 5G. Companies opening such centres are not only well versed in running them but also know how to keep them relevant as AI evolves at an unprecedented pace, he said.

The AI/GenAI labs that companies like TCS, Infosys, HCLTech, as well as software vendors such as Salesforce and Microsoft have rolled out in key global cities do more than just showcase their work in AI, Parab said. “They also act as a sandbox environment, where customers can collaborate with the provider's AI experts to ideate, develop, test, and rapidly refine proof of concepts.”

Also, partnerships with renowned academic institutions of the region, like Infosys-University of Cambridge in London and TCS-Cornell Tech in New York help the lab double up as a centre of research and education for students, faculty and customers, “positively positioning the provider's brand in the hotly contested AI talent market”, he said.