“Kochi is the fastest growing lab for us. In two years, we have doubled our capacity there. And these are highly paid jobs … so we are seeing good success both in Ahmedabad and Kochi,” said Dinesh Nirmal, senior vice president (products) at IBM Software.
IBM has five labs in India including a central facility in Bengaluru, two smaller facilities in Pune and Hyderabad and the new centres in Kochi and Ahmedabad that are driving a lot of the solutions used on IBM’s flagship artificial intelligence platform Watsonx.
Speaking to ET, without giving out specific numbers, the California-based executive said the new hiring will be in thousands. “By the end of this year, we will double the hiring through mostly campuses because that’s where we are getting the good talent,” Nirmal said, adding that “we have tie-ups with universities and once they (new recruits) come in, we will also put them through rigorous training”.
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Tier-2 Cities Are Vibrant
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IBM is expanding in Bengaluru, too, but here it is not easy to get talents unlike in tier-2 cities like Ahmedabad and Kochi, Nirmal said. “In Bengaluru, hiring is not swift as we would like it to … It is harder to hire and retain talent in Bengaluru. But in places like Kochi, the vibrancy is different. It has been a really good experience for us to be in Kochi.”“In tier-2 cities, there is tremendous enthusiasm to be back in office,” he said in response to a query dealing with work-from-home requests from employees. “Collaboration really drives innovation. It (Kochi) is a young lab, most of these are freshers. They want to come into the lab and code,” the executive said.
Kochi will become probably one of the most critical development centres for the American multinational in the next five years, he said. “We will continue to bring talents to Ahmedabad and Kochi. Both are core to our future strategy.”
IBM is also seeing more leadership roles emerging in such centres with the most recent being Sudheesh Kairali, architect of watsonx.data, Data & AI at IBM leading a team out of Kochi, he said.
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Made In Kochi
On building software within India, Nirmal said: “One discussion I’ve had with the minister (Kerala industries minister P Rajeev) is how do we create software purely made out of Kochi and that has happened which is going to be used by many large corporations worldwide. It is more of a digital labour. How does software act like an employee would act? … How can we really drive digital labour into the market? It’s a huge space.”
Increasingly, he said, the Indian workforce at tier-one centres are requesting for transfer to these tier-two cities which now also have high-paying and high-end AI kind of jobs. “That’s why I talk about a reverse brain drain. And that’s happening because people have good jobs, good skilled jobs (in tier-two cities),” he said.
From a pure development perspective, Nirmal pointed out that India will play a huge role in driving IBM’s core product development and probably become one of the primary centres of development in the coming years.
Globally, in May last year, IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said he expected to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years.
