One Thing Today in Tech
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Why Google wants to make its Pixel smartphone in India
Google is reportedly ready to make its Pixel phones in India, starting with the Pixel 8 to be assembled at a Foxconn International plant in Tamil Nadu. Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, and Navkendar Singh, associate vice president at IDC India, unpack the big picture here. Google is starting small but has the heft to scale in a massive market by sheer numbers that is far from saturated. The long-term play is also about tapping the maturing electronics ecosystem in India over the next decade and beyond
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Why some Indian tech startups are coming home now
Why are some of India's best-known fintech startups, but also others, engaging in what is popularly called a "reverse flip" to move their holding parent entities back to India from countries such as the US, Singapore and so on. It can be a fairly complex, time-consuming process, but these companies - Groww, PineLabs and Razorpay are in the news - feel it's worth the trouble. In this episode, Keyur Shah, Partner and Leader - Financial Services Tax, EY India, succinctly unpacks this trend
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How Satya Nadella wants to bring Microsoft AI to everyone
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offered a glimpse into his plan for how the company will bring AI to everyone — via its Copilot stack on its Azure cloud platform, keynoting the company's 14th edition of its annual developer conference, Build, on May 21. In this episode, Sidhant Rastogi, president for technology services and platforms at Zinnov, a management consultancy, and Deepika Giri, associate vice president and head of research — big data and AI, at IDC Asia Pacific, unpack the big picture from Nadella's speech
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How real is the AI opportunity for Indian IT companies?
A report last week from Tata Consultancy Services on "AI for Business" revealed some of the barriers to achieving the so-called "transformation" that large companies seek, in implementing new tech and processes — especially generative AI in this case. So where does the IT services industry really stand with respect to generative AI as an opportunity for serious growth. Yugal Joshi, a partner at Everest Group, an IT outsourcing consultancy, gives us a glimpse into the nuances involved
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Debjani Ghosh at Nasscom on the AI opportunity for India's tech industry
Nasscom, India's biggest technology industry lobby, had their annual flagship conference last week, and every conversation was about artificial intelligence. In this extended edition of One Thing Today in Tech, we bring you a quick chat with Nasscom's President Debjani Ghosh, who gives us a sense of how India's tech services companies are approaching the AI opportunity
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How India's IT services industry is approaching the AI opportunity
India's efforts to build core AI technologies is at best at a nascent stage. At the country's biggest tech industry lobby Nasscom's annual flagship conference last week, we caught up with Debjani Ghosh, the organisation's president, for a quick chat on the topic. Ghosh spoke about how India's tech services companies are approaching the AI opportunity, including lessons from India's experiment with its digital public infrastructure
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How Infosys, TCS might benefit as enterprises move to sunset legacy apps using AI
India's top IT companies might benefit as their biggest customers look to finally sunset legacy applications that are only being maintained for the critical data they hold. Enterprises with thousands of applications have marked one in ten as 'end of life,' the consultancy ISG, notes in a recent analysis. In just Asia Pacific, which lags the US in generative AI investments, companies are expected collectively spend some $3.4 billion over the next year, Infosys estimates in a recent report
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IT services companies may benefit as enterprises tap AI to sunset legacy apps
In one thing today in tech, India's top IT companies might benefit as their biggest customers look to sunset legacy applications that are only being maintained for the critical data they hold. In just Asia Pacific, which lags the US in generative AI investments, companies are expected collectively spend some $3.4 billion over the next year. In other headlines, Paytm taps former SEBI boss M Damodaran to help it meet RBI's compliance diktat. And India's parliamentary committee on IT raises alarm over the PhonePe Google Pay duopoly
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Google retires Bard with launch of Gemini Advanced as $20 subscription
Google, on Feb. 8, launched its most powerful AI chatbot yet, called Gemini Advanced, based on its Ultra 1.0 large language model. With this, the company is also pulling together all its AI products and features into the Gemini brand. Google is rolling out Gemini on smartphones with a new Android app and within the Google app on iOS. This is all initially only in English, but Google says it is working to add more languages, starting with Japanese and Korean
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Tech layoffs in 2024 already: 32,500 and counting as AI takes precedence
Tech companies have already shed about 32,500 jobs in 2024, according to layoffs.fyi, which tracks jobs at 5,000 tech companies. Snap, the parent company of the video and photo sharing app Snapchat, yesterday became the latest to announce cuts, when it said in an SEC filing it would reduce its headcount by 10 percent worldwide, affecting more than 500 people. In India, the top IT services companies entered the new year with their collective workforce lower by tens of thousands of employees
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Apple's Vision Pro is in US stores, but a see-through AR glass isn't on the horizon yet
Apple, on Feb. 2 announced that its Vision Pro AR headsets were available for sale in stores in the US. Apple calls the headset a spatial computer, which works by tracking natural hand gestures and movement of your eyes. The $3,500 headset is unlikely to be available in India anytime soon. In the long run, see-through AR glasses are the real deal, unlike the video from multiple cameras rendered onto a display, but that tech will take time before a consumer-grade device can happen