Wipro's deploys 'soft robots' to manage helpdesk, recruitment

After launching its cognitive intelligence platform ‘Holmes’, Wipro, India’s third largest IT services company is now using this in-house innovation to automate internal functions such as helpdesk management and recruitment using what it terms as 'soft robot’ or ‘genie’. The aim is to improve efficiency by optimizing the resource utilization and reduce the costs, said K R Sanjiv, chief technology officer of the Bengaluru-based company.

All these innovations are being driven out of Wipro’s Technovation Center located at the company’s sprawling campus in Electronic City which has around 300 researchers from diverse backgrounds, including more than 30 PhDs in different specialisations. Holmes, a cognitive machine learning platform, is currently in a pilot testing stage at various customer premises including electronic KYC (know your customer) process for a bank.

Within the company, Wipro has already rolled out the programme for its internal help desk management, which receives about 12,000 queries and complaints from employees, with almost 95% accuracy and much faster response. This has not only helped the company in saving costs towards deploying manpower, but the company is now exploring how to develop a 'recruitment genie’ that can automate the hiring process.

“We are just reacting to the environment outside. During the last 2-3 years, we have been creating sweet spots in few key areas where we believe disruption is going to happen in the future,” said Sanjiv, a Wipro veteran who has spent nearly two and half decades with the company. “We are focusing on four key themes including cognitive system, human machine interface, smart devices like Internet of Things (IoT) and next generation architecture.”

Wipro is now in the process of opening a similar Technovation Centre in Mountain View, California, where it intends to demonstrate to clients many of the futuristic innovations it is carrying out apart from working in close collaboration with start-ups.

“We are also closely working with industry body Nasscom in its industry partnership programme with the objective of working with start-ups in India which complements the works that we are already doing. We are supplementing this with selective investments in innovative start-ups through our corporate venture arm which has a corpus of around $100 million,” Sanjiv added.

According to various reports, in a recent interaction with analysts, Wipro’s CEO T K Kurien had said that the company was planning to save $300 million in operations by using automation and artificial intelligence platforms. The company is also looking at improving the employee productivity by 30% over the next three years.

Holmes, which is touted as a challenger to IBM’s Watson, a cognitive intelligence platform, is expected to supplement Wipro’s existing such platforms such as Base and ServiceNXT management services platforms.