‘Differentiator of LTIMindtree is AI Adoption, Rather than Another Shiny Toy’
Ask an Indian IT company about how it uses AI, and you will learn nothing. This highlights why such companies remain service-driven rather than product-focused. Many of them also shy away from revealing the revenues they earn from their investments in generative AI. To get some clarity about why this is the case, AIM spoke with Nachiket Deshpande, COO at LTIMindtree, and he did not hold back. Commenting on the recent deal with Voicing AI, in which LTIMindtree committed $6 million to build human-like AI voice agents, Deshpande said, “There are so many startups that are coming all around the world. We would want to leverage those startups for those technologies that are coming up.” Elaborating on the philosophy that LTIMindtree follows when it comes to AI, Deshpande said the company stands on three pillars: AI in everything, everything for AI, and AI for everyone. He added that AI solutions must integrate seamlessly into users’ existing workflows. For example, if someone uses SAP, ServiceNow, or Outlook daily, the AI solution should meet them there; not as a separate platform. “This is what we refer to as the co-pilot approach, ensuring AI systems are agentic, API-driven, and omnipresent.” GenAI is Moving Too Quickly “Over the last two years, there’s been overwhelming noise around generative AI. My challenge was to build a strategy that is simple to adopt, enabling all 86,000 employees at LTIMindtree to align with it,” Deshpande revealed. “More importantly, I wanted a pragmatic approach: something relevant to us and not just general AI industry discourse.” Unlike other IT companies like Infosys or TCS, which are claiming to be building in-house generative AI solutions, LTIMindtree has decided to be transparent and said that there is no point in spending so much time and money on building AI products when so many have already been built. “Any technology we develop today risks becoming obsolete in a matter of months, and keeping up would require significant capital investment. The P&L structure of services companies like ours is fundamentally different from product companies,” Deshpande explained.  “They operate with 80% cross-market, and hence they have the ability to continue to do R&D, and we operate at 30-35% cross-market.” He believes that if a company invests and builds a particular technology like AI, it might soon become irrelevant. “I need to get 86,000 people to reimagine their work with AI, but I only need 2,000 people to build AI solutions,” he said. According to him,  even that number is high and requires a lot of investment. “The differentiation of LTIMindtree will lie in terms of how we adopt AI, rather than saying I have another shiny toy which is better than somebody else. Because that differentiation is short-lived,” he added. What is LTIMindtree’s AI Goal? Deshpande explained that if a company wants to take an AI solution from proof of concept (POC) and roll it out to 10,000 customer service agents, it needs all of this to be built within the organisation in advance. Following the three pillars of its philosophy, LTIMindtree wants to reimagine every service it offers with AI – to move AI solutions from POC to large-scale deployment. For instance, rolling out solutions to 10,000 customer service agents. This creates a new revenue opportunity for us as customers invest in these capabilities. Apart from Voicing AI, the IT firm also closed a $240 million deal in the manufacturing sector, where it replaced three competitors by consolidating the client’s application maintenance and running a portfolio with an AI-first approach. Since then, LTIMindtree has announced five to six similar AI-centric wins, with a large portion of the pipeline also reflecting this strategy. These are just a few of the examples. One of the most successful generative AI applications by LTIMindtree is Canvas, which is a platform specifically designed to take AI-driven ideas into production. Deshpande said that over 13 customers live on the platform, which integrates seamlessly with their other AI investments. “I predict every single dollar of revenue will have a generative AI component embedded in it,” he revealed. Many IT firms like Mphasis and Persistent Systems are increasingly focusing on agentic AI. Larger players like Infosys and TCS are also building multi-agent systems. Deshpande believes this shift is happening because the biggest productivity gains lie in persona-centric AI solutions. For example, in a team, small productivity improvements for every individual don’t create a monetisable impact. “But if a developer delivers better story point velocity, a support engineer resolves more tickets, or testing cycles shrink from weeks to days, the gains become significant. Agentic systems automate large portions of a persona’s workflow, delivering tangible productivity outcomes,” he added. When asked about why all Indian IT companies do not reveal the revenue from generative AI, Deshpande said that for LTIMindtree, almost every service has AI embedded in it. “It is not a revenue stream for IT services companies. For NVIDIA, it will be a revenue stream. For Microsoft, it will be a revenue stream.” For LTIMindtree, however, it will not be a bigger revenue stream. Instead, it will be the key revenue stream.  Considering that the impact of AI is much bigger than any revenue component any of the service companies will give, Deshpande concluded, “Counting AI revenue is not a measure that we would like to go after because I think it misrepresents the impact of AI.
LTIMindtree has decided to be transparent and said that there is no point in spending time and money on building AI products when so many have already been built.
LTIMindtree wants to reimagine every service it offers with AI – to move AI solutions from POC to large-scale deployment.
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Mohit writes about AI in simple, explainable, and often funny words. He's especially passionate about chatting with those building AI for Bharat, with the occasional detour into AGI.