Wipro seeks to streamline various internal processes via start-up tech

Wipro Ltd is turning to a start-up for technology which the country’s third largest software exporter believes will help it automate a lot of internal processes. The move is the first such engagement where a large Indian IT company is using the technology of a start-up to become a nimble organization.

Significantly, this move by Wipro could prompt other technology firms in the country to deploy technologies to improve the way they do business, according to a few experts. Wipro’s cross-city rival Infosys Ltd, which, too, has set up a corporate venture arm, has picked stakes in start-ups as the company wants to take new-age technologies, including artificial intelligence platforms, to many of its clients.

“Currently, we are evaluating the technology of Vicarious for various OCR (Optical Character Recognition) based internal intelligent process automation initiatives,” said Wipro chief strategy officer Rishad Premji last month. Rishad Premji, elder son of Wipro chairman Azim Premji, is overseeing $100-million Wipro Ventures, the venture arm of Wipro, which picked up a small stake in Vicarious earlier this year.

Rishad declined to share details on which internal processes at Wipro are using the start-up’s intelligent platform, but an executive familiar with the work currently under way at Wipro said the company is using the technology platform to improve its own travel and expense management application used internally.

Set up in 2010 by Indian-born researcher Dileep George, San Francisco-based artificial intelligence start-up Vicarious counts Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist Peter Thiel among its investors. It claims to have created an intelligent algorithm that can solve CAPTCHA or completely automated public Turing text to tell computers and humans apart.

CAPTCHAs are a security tool, using distorted and wavy letters a user must understand and type into a box when a user creates an email account with Google or makes an online payment. CAPTCHAs are deployed by companies to check if a genuine human or a computer-controlled algorithm is accessing the site.

Its simplest use, which Wipro is using to improve its travel and expense management application, is when employees file to make refunds on bills. The accounts and finance section at Wipro deploys many people to manually punch in these texts every time an invoice has to be processed. Using the technology of Vicarious, Wipro can save time and humans it deploys to get the expense statement approved. Considering Wipro employees make close to 300,000 trips every year and each business trip could have up to 15 bills, including travel, stay, and cab rentals, such an intelligent platform, the company believes, will help it reduce the time and effort required.

An email sent to George of Vicarious on Friday remained unanswered.

Some experts believe that Wipro’s decision to improve its internal process is logical as large Indian IT companies embrace the technologies of digital era to improve the way they have done business and later take many of these offerings to their clients.

“It is logical that Wipro is using these technologies to improve its own operations. Much of the cutting edge innovation in enterprise is coming from start-ups who get digital disruption technologies,” said Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research, a technology research and advisory firm.

“Vicarious is way beyond OCR—this is a visual and language-based artificial intelligence platform that can be used to identify operational efficiencies inside companies as well as used for additional service offerings,” said Wang, adding that this presages other Indian IT firms too embracing some of the technologies of the start-ups to improve its internal processes.

The management believes that once completed, Wipro may offer this travel application to many of its large clients across the world.

“We may look at taking it to our clients at a later stage,” said Rishad Premji, declining to disclose the investment made by Wipro in Vicarious.

Wipro’s $100 million corporate venture arm has minority stakes in four US-based start-ups; since May 2013—even before Wipro formally set up a corporate venture arm late last year—Wipro has made five investments in start-ups. It sold its stake in one, US-based machine-learning start-up Axeda, to Nasdaq-listed PTC Inc. Wipro has spent $30 million to buy a stake in Opera Solutions, a New-Jersey based data analytics company and invested $5 million in Drivestream Inc., a Virginia-based cloud solutions start-up.

During the April-June period this year, Wipro also made undisclosed investments in Vicarious and California-based early-stage big data start-up Talena Inc.