Also in this letter:
■ HCLTech CEO sees headwinds for Q1
■ Indian firms rush to hire AI chiefs
■ India to turn manufacturing hub: Siemens
For ecommerce, heat wrings out the worst of worries
Sweltering heat across major cities in India are worsening the shortage of gig workers across food delivery and quick commerce sectors, industry executives and workers told ET.
Rising mercury levels: Between May and July, the supply of gig workers usually dips by nearly a fifth due to the sweltering heat. However, the early onset of summer has exacerbated the situation this year, according to online commerce industry executives. At the beginning of the month, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) flagged extreme heat conditions during April-June.
On-ground impact: Gig workers across Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai complained they were struggling with the ongoing heatwave, due to inadequate support from platforms. “I joined two weeks ago, and in just two days, I suffered a sunstroke,” said Abu Usama, a Blinkit delivery partner who operates in Mumbai’s Marine Lines area. Usama could not work for the two days he was sick, and had to miss out on pay.
Persistent problem: Industry executives said platforms constantly face a nearly 20% shortage in supply of workers during the summer. Harsh weather as well as cyclical migration often complicates this further. Extreme weather conditions will continue to drive unpredictability and increase absenteeism among gig workers, they added.
Also read | Rising mercury cranks up the heat in AC market
The rise of Airchat and debate over navigating Internet with voice
Founded by Naval Ravikant, cofounder of investment platform AngelList and all-purpose tech guru, Airchat is “Silicon Valley’s latest obsession”, according to an article in Wired earlier this month. Could Airchat be in danger of heading the Clubhouse way?
Can it gain momentum? Voice is the second oldest means of modern long-distance communication, after the telegraph. However, in the digital realm, voice as a communication tool has not been able to capitalise on its promise, despite early hype.
Answer lies in data: Over the last five years, Google search trends data in India for the phrases “Ok Google” and “Hey Google”, a proxy for voice searches, showed a peak of 100 in late 2022, but their popularity has declined to 17 and 60, respectively, now.
In January, Google Assistant disabled a host of voice commands for actions like operating audiobooks and rescheduling events on Google Calendar as they are “underutilised”.
There was a 15.4% decline in global shipment of smart speakers in Q1 2023, year-on-year, as per IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Smart Home Device Tracker report in June last year.
Expert take: A major limitation of voice as an input medium is “inaccuracy due to training sets,” says Soren Hamby, a product design and accessibility lead based in the US. “Most of these features do not provide accurate transcription based on gender, dialect and accent.”
Also read |ET Explainer: How Airchat works, and what its relaunch means for the social audio segment
Financial services revenue could be impacted in Q1: HCLTech CEO Vijayakumar
C Vijayakumar, CEO and MD of HCLTech
Financial services that led the growth for India’s third-largest IT services firm HCLTech is set to see some revenue impact in the first quarter of FY25, said CEO and MD C Vijayakumar in an interaction with ET.
CEOspeak: “Our business has got a good mix of programmes which are discretionary in nature and a good mix of annuity kind of businesses. Now, as we see, we have a good pipeline of large deals, which we expect will materialise in the next few quarters,” Vijayakumar said.
Result recap: Led by a 12.1% growth in the financial services vertical, HCLTech delivered the highest on-year growth in the Indian IT industry at 8.3% in FY24.
Within BFSI, larger rivals TCS and Infosys reported a 3.2% YoY decline in growth for the quarter with a 32% market share, while Infosys, with over 26% share, posted an 8.4% YoY degrowth in Q4FY24. Younger peer Wipro’s BFSI growth also dipped by 8.9%.
Turbulent year: In the past two weeks of the final quarter and full fiscal 2024 earnings announcements, most IT majors failed to meet their revenue growth guidance. Many downward revisions for the year ahead were seen despite most firms bagging large deals and sitting on an arsenal of historic total contract value (TCV) wins.
Also read | Top IT companies cut over 72,000 jobs in FY24
India Inc rushes to recruit chief AI officers
The buzz around artificial intelligence has companies scampering to hire top talent for running their AI ops and design future strategies, experts told us.
Driving the news: Job portals and headhunters are currently swamped with requests from top corporations on the lookout for a chief AI officer (CAIO).
Job portals show over 350 openings for AI leadership roles in India and 10 for the role of CAIO, according to Kapil Joshi, deputy CEO, Quess IT Staffing. A February study by Nasscom and BCG found approximately 70% of technology services companies in India have established such leadership roles.
Who is a CAIO? The role is pivotal for securing leadership endorsement and spearheading the planning and execution of AI readiness across the enterprise, said Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at IT industry body Nasscom. “As AI becomes integral to core business operations, organisations are recognizing the need for dedicated AI leadership positions.”
Other Top Stories By Our Reporters
India poised to become a top manufacturing hub: Siemens executives | India is addressing infrastructure bottlenecks hindering its manufacturing growth and is well-placed to become one of the top manufacturing hubs in the world, said two senior executives at German manufacturing giant Siemens AG.
India makes significant progress in AI, Germany, Spain lag: As many as 91% of India-based companies will use half or more of their data to train AI models in 2024, data infrastructure company NetApp said in its Cloud Complexity Report. The report touted India as leading the charge when it comes to AI projects, closely followed by Singapore. Other countries like Germany and Spain were bracketed as being laggards in the AI race.
CII introduces corporate governance charter tailored for startups: The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has launched a corporate governance charter for startups. It will provide suggestions on corporate governance tailored for startups and offer guidelines suitable for different stages of a startup which is aiming to enhance governance practices.
Global Picks We Are Reading
■ Sale or no sale, TikTok will never be the same (Wired)
■ The era of one-stop grocery shopping is over (WSJ)
■ Meta’s gamble on chatbots opens new wave of tech competition (FT)
