Transformer by Mint | Inside TCS’s $6 billion race to catch the AI wave

This week, our IT correspondent Jas Bardia kept a close eye on TCS—India’s single-biggest tech company by employee count, revenue and valuation. On 9 October, the company abruptly cancelled a pre-scheduled press briefing—a first in at least three years. Ironically, this was the very quarter when TCS had more explaining to do than ever.

Why? Because in the past two years, TCS has struggled to keep pace with bigger competitor Accenture, not lived up to shareholder expectations, and even announced a decision to lay-off over 12,000 people. Since this time exactly two years ago, TCS’s shares have dropped by over 16%. Compounding its issues further, Accenture, which TCS likely wants to beat, has surged ahead—Mint’s corporate editor Varun Sood, along with Jas, wrote a prolific story this week about how Accenture is leaving all of India’s IT firms in the dust as far as AI is concerned.

Clearly, TCS is aware of its risks, and last week, it announced that it will invest $6-7 billion to set-up an adjacent data centre business to try and catch up with AI via infrastructure. Analysts believe that its goal with this announcement is to start roping in clients into its 1 gigawatt data centre business plan—and ramp-up its service integration offering to them eventually. In the long run, it would hope that the plan will revive its mojo to hire again, increase growth rate again, and take on larger peers again.

Except, shareholders and analysts haven’t bought its promise yet. Since the announcement, TCS shares are down 1%. Analysts have all said that more details are needed to understand how this will all play out. What does this mean for India’s biggest mass recruiter of engineering graduates? Can TCS still retain its top status? Jas and Varun have all the details for you, this week.

Have you received a spam call recently?

Last week, Varun, whom I report to as well, made a succinct observation when we were speaking with each other: of late, spam calls have become far easier to avoid.

“At least on nine of the 10 spam calls that we all get, I’ve been getting an alert from my network provider that it is likely spam—and I simply don’t take those calls. Life has become far more peaceful since then," he said.

At the India Mobile Congress conference, I spoke with the three private telecom operators of India, each of which had a similar story to tell: spam detection is an important feature that has come out of the telcos pursuing their own AI stacks. The result? Airtel said it has flagged 20 billion spam calls in the past 12 months, while Vodafone-Idea said it flagged 600 million in three months.

For once, AI is doing something we all like: making our lives quieter. The crackdown is hurting unlicensed telemarketers and paving the way for detecting digital fraud and scam calls, too.

If you’re wondering about spam rates going down steadily, this one’s a must-read for you.

A cross-border signal: Indo-US telco deal

Every time I travel to Silicon Valley, I invariably rely on a local e-SIM for mobile data. This is cost-efficient, and offers the bare data access that I require for email, texts and calls. Turns out, T-Mobile and Reliance Jio are taking this to the next step with a closer collaboration idea.

Jatin Grover, Mint’s telecom correspondent, wrote last week about how the T-Mobile and Jio partnership will lead to continuation of premium service offerings between India and the US, and present a user with a seamless network offering. In other words, there will be seamless data switching, usage of the same quota of data, and access to premium content and gaming services for users on this shared network deal—leading to a superior network experience.

I’m not sure if, in today’s age of unbridled access to content everywhere, we in India rely much on telco-driven access to streaming services. But, there are enough millions of users who do depend upon telco-based subscriptions in order to manage their recurring content costs. Jatin brings you all the details here.

The H-1b fight goes on

The fight against the H-1b visa fee hike goes on. Jas, who is also tracking the case of India’s tech employees who heavily rely on this visa, spoke with lawyers challenging US president Donald Trump’s decision to raise the bar 100x for the critical H-1b visa. The result: a long standoff.

Lawyers state that the order by Trump is an overreach, and is taking the fight to court. It’s going to be a long-drawn saga, and even though the latest data says India’s volume of H-1b applications is reducing in recent years, we still remain its largest benefactor. Interestingly enough, two of the top Big Tech firms today have chief executives who once went to the US on the very same H-1b visa programme.

If you were counting on it too, here’s what you need to know.

In other news: More Asus laptops, and Musk’s Starlink in rural India

I spoke with Arnold Su, the head of Taiwanese laptop maker Asus’ consumer-end business in India. You’d recognize Asus as the makers of gaming laptops called ‘ROG’, complete with bold red inlays and flashy LED lighting almost similar to Mercedes-Benz cars. His bet is on India doubling its gaming laptop demand, but not just for games—users are buying these flashy machines for video editing, coding and more. But that’s not just it—Su also notes that AI hasn’t taken off for a reason, but believes it will, as Asus looks to sell 2 million laptops per year in India itself, within the next four fiscals.

Meanwhile, Starlink believes India’s rural circles are key to the growth of this satcom service provider. Parnil Urdhwareshe, director for Starlink in India, was at the India Mobile Congress, where our man Jatin was, too. In a roundtable, he happened to mention that despite its premium pricing, the key code to crack for Starlink will be rural users—since they are the ones to bring in capacity. He’s betting on first-time users getting “a great broadband experience for the first time ever," Jatin reports. But, in a value-sensitive market like India, isn’t that a conundrum?

Transformer by Mint is a weekly newsletter that brings India’s most important and interesting technology updates under one umbrella. As the world transforms with every day of innovation, Transformer will keep a tab on the impact that technologies will make in each of our lives. Published every week, the newsletter brings some of India’s tech landscape’s most insightful coverages until date.