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upGrad Enterprise aims to build the world’s largest GenAI learning initiative to enable high-growth companies to embrace technology’s transformative business impact. Hosted by Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterprise, the GenAIrous Podcast, will curate an exciting roster of global experts and guests, who are at the cutting-edge of Generative AI, and its varied applications in the world of business.
Welcome to the GenAIrous Podcast where we unravel the fascinating world of generative AI and its transformative impact on business globally. I'm your host, Srikanth Iyengar, CEO of upGrad Enterprise. At upGrad Enterprise, we're building the world's largest Gen AI learning initiative, empowering high growth companies to leverage cutting edge technology. Each week, join me and the roster of global experts as we explore innovations shaping the world of work as we know it. Let's get GenAIrous.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Welcome to another episode of the GenAIrous Podcast. I'm really delighted to have Srimathi Shivashankar join us today. Srimathi, how are you?
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:I'm doing well, Srikanth. So good to see you as always.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Thank you for joining us today. As you know, we talk about all things to do with Gen AI and the trends on this podcast. We're really delighted to have you here. You know, as a background for our listeners, Srimathi Shivashankar is part of the exec committee at HCL. She also runs the global learning business for HCL. She's played multiple roles for HCL through the past and has a had a storied career in the tech services space. So, you know, really delighted that Srimathi is here. I should also mention that Srimathi is a big champion of diversity at the workplace, especially in tech services. So, Shimaathy, that's an area that we'll touch on as well as we talk. But let's let's get started.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Look. You run the learning business, You know, HCL, of course, is a global, you know, world renowned tech services company, but you also, you know, support clients and we partner together on skilling. But talk me a bit through AI adoption. Right? And also talk me a bit through what you're seeing university is doing, what you're seeing companies doing, and what the role of industry, academia, or collaboration is in this space.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:I think, Srikanth, many of us who have computer science background would know that some form of AI has always existed. Right? So from the neural networks to fuzzy logic and also looking largely into the compute computational basics and the computing principles, it this is all data, AI, everything has been an integral part of, what I would call as a core computer science. Somehow over the last few years, I think some of it, they got diminished. But right now, with the big data coming, analytics coming, where predictability is, and forecasting techniques are extremely important, for running the operations or for setting up any new businesses or even, you know, for innovations and inventions.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:I think Srikanth the whole concept has gone through a 360 and come back to a very accelerating, should I say, in a very accelerated inflection point. Mhmm. I think, the purpose of AI is something everyone knows. The purpose of Gen AI, I think everyone recognizes. Are the corporates ready? Is the workforce ready? I don't think we are ready yet. We are all very eager, but we are not ready yet.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:Let me just give you a simple example, Srikanth. So, of course, we all know that there could be analytical, analytics and analytics, tools, which can even be a non Python. So we can use an Excel, and we can start working around the analytics tools and do business analytics and visualization through that. However, when we come into the development, phase, in the developers community, the key skills could be around Python. It could be around ML and so on. But much of the, learners or much of the even the working professionals today, we have not invested much in some of the fundamentals like the regression analysis or the statistical tools. Right, Srikanth.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:So there is there is going to be a, a blend of, what I would call as, the regular, non, STEM analytical tools, which is the STEM analytical tools, which are much sought after the industry. Therefore, those people who may say we are great programmers should also go back to some basics with the help of academicians in computing, even, going back to the fundamental of analytics, fundamental of regression, various regression models and statistical tools. While I do believe that people who have been on academic side now have to sit in a real industry and understand, hey. What is the maturity of the industry? If early if people are gonna start off as early learners or if, the students from the universities are going to enter into the, companies, at what level they should really get started?
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:AI is changing every day. So Yep. I think academics and corporate coming together now is extremely important.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:No. I think the point you bring up about the fundamentals of the basics is very important, Srimathi. As you know, the tool sets evolve by the day. You know, people are talking about the fact that very soon you won't really need coding skills at depth. Certain code can be generated by the, app itself or by the model itself.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:But you will need those fundamental skills because what you ask for will determine what the output is. And so your knowledge of the fundamentals becomes critical, and that's where academia plays a key role. Completely understand. But let me let me touch on something else Srimathi. I know this is something very close to your heart.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:You know, the tech services space has been looking at driving gender diversity for many years. You've been a champion of this. I know you're a, you know, ex co level champion at HCL. You've done that in previous companies. Do you see a Gen AI impacting that? And if so, in what way?
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:I think, technology by itself has no gender. Technology is one of the best equalizers when it comes to competency based development. And with the AI actually kicking in, I see a great many job roles which will emerge where the work can be taken to where workers are. So many, women especially have lost out, in their traditional workplaces. It's because of certain life inflection points where they have to stay away from work, and they have other priorities that kick in.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:So I think, with this new job roles and AI evolving, I I see working from anywhere, especially the virtual job roles, will surely, increase. Srikanth, as you know, you and I speaking now, the platform pretty much is AI enabled.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Yes.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:And many issues around safety, security, data confidentiality, which otherwise would creep for anyone who's working remote, now gets proctored and managed by AI itself.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Yes.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:So the cost to the company is also less. Those days, any deviation from a regular work policy cost was always a factor for someone to say an yes or no. They would say, if I have to give special permission for women to work from remote locations or women to take up a job role in the remote locations, we may compromise on productivity, safety, security, and so on. Right, Srikanth?
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:So I see that, you know, it is not going to stop tech women from progressing. The other aspect she called by statistics. Right? If you go through, the data points, almost about 70% of the women worldwide are largely in humanities.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:AI led tools, very simple. They can actually invest and learn technology very quickly because World Economic Forum says more than 1,000,000,000 jobs are going to be impacted. AI is going to play a very important role on how the jobs are going to be impacted. In my view, those women who want to switch or who want to observe technology as an integral part of their overall career landscape, I think AI has made it more easy. AI has made technology adoption a lot easier than what it was like you just mentioned, like, the coding was very difficult. Not every humanities person would want to get into coding, it may not interest them at all.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:But the AI tools can actually help them to simplify some of these learning and get them also started on absorption or adoption of technology to update careers. So women to a large extent who formed the 70 or 60% of the cohort as as the statistics in the humanities and hospitality and other service sector, Srikanth, to a large extent, I think they will get benefited. So it becomes a equalizer.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Absolutely. And, you know, the point about humanities is, super critical because as technology takes over the actual sort of analytics, if you call it that, and the model, the quality of prompting or the quality of asking questions is what will determine where you get to. And humanity has become very important because, you know, in the sciences, you often deal with specific answers. Whereas in humanities, you deal with many different shades of gray. And the ability to recognize those shades of gray is what will make the difference to the outcome or the output of the, you know, so so completely.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:Srikanth, I'm so glad you touched upon the, the questions. I do believe that even before someone embarks onto, the prompt engineering, I think how to structure questions will become very important. We're all getting back to basics.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Yes.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:We're getting back to basics of asking questions, articulate your questions, articulate your asks well so that you understand and relate to the problem statements. So the whole analytic and creative thinking that we need to have and didn't have for a few years, right, because our focus was more on what to deliver rather than why to deliver. I think we are going we are all becoming, we are moving we are doing shift left rather than shift right in terms of our capabilities to ask why are we doing what we are doing and how to actually structure the questions, in a AI led world. And I'm sure it's a right balance between humanities and technology. So many engineers need to learn a bit of humanities right now because emotional intelligence become an integral part of doing any job around AI.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Yes.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:Right? With understanding ethics or asking the right questions or tuning your AI product to function ethically, the power of asking questions is going to be very, very important, Srikanth. I'm sure Srikanth, in your and my school days, we were told not to ask questions. Right?
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:I was gonna add, Srimathi, you know, both you and I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with Nandan in the past in a previous role. And in a recent podcast, Nandan was talking about the development of AI in India. And he talked about the fact that today, most models across the world are built in English as as we know. And India has, you know, a plethora of languages, dialects. And if people were to build all that into a model for the country, you know, the the the impact could be significant, and that could address, like you said, the, you know, diversity that could address inclusivity for remote areas. There could be many, many offshoots that come out as a result of that.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:I think, Bhashini Tool is very helpful, Shikant, because, you know, I don't have much of, competency around languages except for my mother tongue and English. Bhashini has been very handy. If Bhashini can actually bring in more integration, into the AI tools and the various AI engines Srikanth, I have a feeling, that would be one of the best products that all of us are an open product that open source that all of us can use and integrate it into our platform? I'm sure they're exploring it for India, Srikanth.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:I'm sure. I'm sure. And that just throws up whole new opportunities for people. So makes makes a lot of sense. Going back to what you said earlier, Srimathi, I know you said it in a light to note.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:Sorry to interrupt. In fact, I just went into some schools, and I've been talking to them. And the school, kids are very excited about, AI and Gen AI and want to know more. However, I think that teachers are very worried. When I go into many of these meetings, including colleges, recently, I went for one of the major conferences. Good combination of academicians and industry, you know, members in the room. And, there was one there are quite a few members in the room who got up and said, ma'am, we come from academics world. Will we lose jobs?
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:Should we use AI, for teaching? And I did tell them, please use AI for teaching because in a way, you can support, with less hallucination. In a way, you can use it and give feedback, from your own teaching perspective, whether, this is a proper question, proper answer, because validation becomes very important. Who, other than teachers, can be the best people to validate?
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:And second, I said, use and tell your teach your students not tell your students, but teach your students the do's and don'ts. As a corporate, I may come up with my own pros and cons, but you should tell them early on how to adopt and the do's and don'ts. Number 33, AI will help you to provide, provide, more insights and, faster research research material. When you review and when you connect the dots and when you validate, you can actually be providing students better set of concepts, which are not available in your current books. That way, even the industry academy or bridge that you need to do can start off from your end.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:You don't even need to wait for us. There is an inherent fear, Sriknath, whether the teachers will lose their jobs. So I told them that teachers will never lose their jobs because teachers still need to teach students the power of asking questions.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:Yeah. And taking the assessments in the right way.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:But it does mean that teachers, like you said, have to upskill themselves as well. They have to stay up to speed completely. I completely understand. Yep. So so just again changing, tracks a bit, Srimathi.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:We talked about diversity. We talked about industry academia. We talked about the impact on workplace, you know, equity. But, you know, even today, you and I talk to corporates. There's this recognition that AI is sort of a huge trend, but some companies hesitate a little because they're like, let's see what happens. So what would you say to say why now? Why not tomorrow? What's the urgency?
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:I think, Srikanth, one of the things they have in their minds is when we have had such waves before. We had something everybody said blockchain and everybody jumped into some kind of a blockchain. Where did it go? So I think, a lot of them, have looked at various things which they thought was like a tech wave with some very less impact. And can we live without it? Yes. We can live without it. Right? However, today, what like I said, when I started our conversation itself, I said this, AI, Gen AI is nothing new.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:From the computing field, Srikanth, all of us have been use using it. In fact, I'm sure Aryabhatta was also using it at some point. Yes. Right?
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Yes.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:We know that. It it's been into Vedic. Vedic math has a direct correlation with the capability of what you can do with the Gen AI.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Yeah. So there has been usage of this in a for a very long time. Why now? Because more and more data seem to be the going way. Data seem to be impacting, whether the client decision making or how you need to look at your, their top line, how you want to manage your bottom line. There seems to be demand from the investors, from your customers, and your own internal employees to validate whenever you come up with certain decisions. Alright? So for a decision making, we are crunching data. Why can't we adopt an AI tool to crunch the data better? And ensure that, you know, you minimize, your issues in terms of false failure because you have not you missed out on certain aspects of computing. So why can't we minimalize your risks of prediction by using the right AI tool? There's nothing wrong. But what if you don't use and suddenly the AI becomes the next bit that you really want to do?
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:Then by that time you decide, you may be too late. You would have missed out certain things. Adopting and learning AI today, Srikanth, doesn't need investments much. It just need only efforts. And with so many of the programs like you and I are bringing into the market together, I think just by through learning the fund fundamentals, through learning, a, is this the right time to get started in an AI with AI tools?
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:I have a feeling, Srikanth, it doesn't, take much time. My concern is if you miss now, is it easy to catch up? Because AI is evolving every day.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Every day. Every day.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:Like you said, I don't know much about it, but I I can't predict. But I think we can't miss out now because
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Completely. Yeah.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:Because there there's a purpose. Unlike many of the technologies that we have seen in many last many years, like the Internet revolution. Mhmm. This is a revolution because it is impacting every part of the business. It has a purpose.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:There is a purpose for this technology, both on top line and bottom line. That's that's exactly where I'm coming.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:No. Completely, Srimathi, I agree. Because like you said, if you don't start now, you're playing catch up with your peer group, with your friends who are at s nine to use your analogy while you're still talking about s one. You know?
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:So completely. But let me let me, you know, this is an interesting chat. Let me ask you another question. A lot of our listeners today are students. They are working professionals.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:They work across corporates. Many of them are fairly early in their career. You had a very, very successful global career in tech services across some world leading companies. And you've seen, like you said, multiple technology shifts through your career. What would your advice be to the people who are in you know, at the start of their career, 2, 3, 5, 6 years into their career who've got probably another 30 odd years to go.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:What would your advice be to them given that this has come fairly earlier early in their journey?
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:So I'm a computer science engineer, and, we all started with a fantastic programming. You know, it's it's we learned we learned the fundamentals very well because we didn't have too many programming languages. Right, Srikanth. So we all started with the c. That day those days, we only had COBOL and C. Correct. Exactly.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:And Unix had just kicked in. Right?
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Yes.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:And, Windows was not even there to start with.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:Those those phones.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:And, they're only Macintosh had this Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It it was called Macintosh. Yeah.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:And the Macintosh, was, like, all about word and, it was not even called word. Right? Macintosh had, like, 3, 4 stuff that you can go for business. It was called as a business, application. And, so a lot evolved, but whenever a new technology kicked in, I think we all immediately learned because we didn't have to unlearn much to learn because technology was just there was something coming new every 6 months.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:So many of us who got into profession then had to unlearn to learn. I think with AI gen AI coming, Srikanth, I have to encourage students to keep unlearning before they learn. We may have to let go of some of the learnings that we have had in the past, either through our education or in the corporate world to adapt to the new ways of, Gen AI because there are gonna be more tools. There are gonna be more tools which are going to be crowdsourced, comes through a crowdsourcing with, a way. It may be an open, tool which needs to get adopted with a b c d a conditions.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:The tools can be or the various products can actually help you to stack up and build something on your own. Many of these are not taught in an education world. So whatever is taught, many of them are traditional ways of software development or a product development, or you putting it into a mobility space or, into a connected intelligence space or into the retail and banking and insurance space. So we have taught them to stitch it in a traditional way, but more and more, they have to unlearn to learn. Yep.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:So my sincere request to the upcoming professionals is the next 10 years, you may have to unlearn more than you have to learn, but quickly unlearn. Don't stick to your old practices, then you'll be successful. I think That's what comes into my mind, Srikanth.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:No, Srimathi. Very, very important advice for our listeners. I think it's been a fascinating conversation. I just want to say thank you again for joining us today and looking forward to working closely together, driving success in the market and driving outcomes for our clients, for our learners. So thank you again.
Srimathi Shivashankar, HCLTech:Thank you, Srikanth
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterpris:And that concludes another episode of the GenAIrous Podcast. We are very grateful to our guests for their time and expertise. A big thank you to our producer, Shantha Shankar in Delhi, and our audio engineer, Nitin Shams in Berlin for making magic happen behind the scenes. Join us next time, and don't forget to subscribe to GenAIrous wherever you listen to your podcasts.