This is in line with plans to grow India’s workforce by a similar amount, with a focus on talent and business expansion across tier-2 cities, amid a global employment downturn.
“For us, our goal over the next two to three years is not just to recruit, but to develop future leaders like Sudheesh Kairali to the next level. and increase the executive population in India by about 20-30%,” said Dinesh Nirmal, IBM’s senior vice president of software products.
The tech giant has already doubled its total workforce in India, following the establishment of two research institutes and a customer innovation center in Kochi and Ahmedabad.
As of December 2023, the company had approximately 282,000 employees worldwide, with roughly one-third likely based in India. The company did not publicly announce the breakup.
The multinational giant will also strengthen its presence in India by adding new tier 2 cities in the coming months, with new and existing cities such as Bangalore, Kochi, Ahmedabad, and sub-regions such as Hyderabad this year. The aim is to increase employment by 25%. .
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Many of these jobs are on-campus. “It’s not just about hiring people, it’s about how to grow the population of technical executives and executives… So it’s not just about hiring people, it’s also about developing leaders,” Nirmal added. .
The California-based executive, who was visiting Kochi in the New Year, said India has always provided IBM with the best skills and is “100 per cent self-sufficient” in terms of talent quality.
reverse migration
“We used to send people from the US to India because we couldn’t find real leaders in India. Now, we have the right people for leadership in India, so for the past three years we haven’t sent anyone. ” said the IBM senior vice president. He termed the current trend as “reverse migration” resulting from rising trust levels and hunger among Indian software companies. However, it is not just about developing leaders within India; it is also about supporting other parts of the world and developing people who can play global roles.
The products his India-based team has developed have been deployed by leading companies around the world, and the brains that built them are right here.
Currently, IBM has five labs in India: a central facility in Bengaluru, two smaller facilities in Pune and Hyderabad, and new centers in Kochi and Ahmedabad, which are used by IBM’s flagship artificial intelligence platform Watsonx. We are promoting many solutions for
In addition to developing talent, IBM is also focused on automation and AI agent efforts.
According to him, AI agents are the next important step in generative AI, replacing conversation-based prompts. AI agents are moving the world toward an autonomous world without human involvement. This enables cost and time savings, resulting in efficiency, productivity and optimization. “It’s not about replacing, it’s about augmenting,” Nirmal explained.
Today, 6-7% of new code is generated by generative AI. “Will it double or triple next year? Indian talent will really help us do that,” Nirmal said, adding that the company is helping IBM’s mission to build the largest supercomputer. He added that the company is also focusing on leveraging Indian human resources.
To get the right talent, IBM also partners with state governments like Kerala, big universities like IIT Gandhinagar, and other local universities. The university also announced an internship program that allows students to start working at IBM early on and develop skills that will help them enter the industry after graduation.
Nirmal also believes that one of the challenges for Indian talent is to overcome risk aversion and fear of failure and become more risk-takers. There is no such thing as “it’s okay to fail”. Because we are internally trained to follow a set path. It’s not in our DNA[to take risks]so we can say to our children, “It’s okay to fail, it’s okay to fail because failure is the first step to learning.” It’s the only thing you have to train for,” Nirmal said.
And if we can change that mindset, India has a huge opportunity to develop more leadership and quality talent, he added.
