“For us, the goal over the next two to three years is not just to do the hiring, but also groom the next set of future leaders like Sudheesh Kairali into the next level. Our goal is to increase our executive population also by about 20-30% over the next 2-3 years from India,” said Dinesh Nirmal, senior vice president, software products at IBM.
The technology giant has already doubled its overall headcount in India following its two labs and client innovation centres set up in Kochi and Ahmedabad.
Of its around 282,000 global workforce as on December 2023, rough estimates suggest that nearly about a third are based in India. The firm does not share the breakup.
The multinational giant is also looking to step up in India by adding a new tier-2 city in the coming months and aim for 25% hiring growth this year in the new and existing cities like Bengaluru, Kochi, Ahmedabad and sub-regions like Hyderabad.
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A lot of these are campus hirings.“It’s not just hiring the people, but how do we also increase the technical executive and executive population… So it’s not just about hiring people, but it’s also about grooming the leaders,” Nirmal added.
The California-based executive, who was on a visit to Kochi in the new year, said India has always given the greatest skills to IBM and is “100% self-sufficient” for the quality of talent.
Reverse migration
“We used to send people from the US on assignment to India, because we could not find the true leaders here. Now, I haven’t sent anybody on assignment in the last three years, because I can get the right talent in India to be the leader,” the IBM Sr VP said. He called the current trend as the ‘reverse-migration’ stemming from the increase in confidence level and hunger in the ranks of Indian software. But it’s not just about grooming people to lead within India but to help other regions in the world and take on global roles.
The products developed by his team based in India are being deployed in major corporations worldwide and that the brain power is right here who have built it.
Presently, 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.
Besides talent grooming, IBM is emphasising work on automation and AI agents.
AI agents, he says, is the next critical phase in generative AI, which will take over from dialogue-based prompts. With AI agents, the world is moving towards an autonomous world without a human in the loop that will enable cost and time savings, bring in efficiency, productivity and optimisation. “It is not about replacement, but augmentation,” Nirmal explained.
Today, 6-7% of the new codes are generated with generative AI. “Can it double or triple it over the next year? For that, the talent in India can really help us,” Nirmal said, adding that the company is also focusing on using Indian talent for IBM’s mission to build the largest supercomputer.
To get the right talent, IBM is also partnering with state governments like Kerala, with big universities like IIT Gandhinagar and other local ones. It has also announced internship programs for students to work with IBM early on and hone the skills to make them industry ready as they step out of college.
Nirmal also believes that one of the challenges for Indian talent is to overcome risk aversion and the fear of failure and become more risk takers. “It-is-okay to-fail” mindset is not there, because we are trained internally to take a set path. It hasn’t been in our DNA (to take risk) and that is the only thing we have to really train our kids to say that it’s okay to fail, because failure is the first step in learning,” Nirmal said.
And if we can change that mindset, he adds India has a huge opportunity to build even more leadership and quality talent within.
