In yet another headache for Facebook-owned WhatsApp, it is under pressure from the Indian government to develop a mechanism to trace the origin of messages. WhatsApp’s global head Will Cathcart met the union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in New Delhi on July 26. After the meeting, Prasad said that Cathcart assured him of prompt action in the case. ‘‘In the event WhatsApp platform is sought to be abused by rogue, terrorists and extremist elements by repeating, recirculation of messages, then there must be a mechanism where those could be traced to enforce law and order, safety and security of the country,’’ Prasad said. While Cathcart didn’t contradict the minister, he said that he had reiterated its support for encryption and how important it is for its product. India is a crucial market for WhatsApp and its parent, Facebook, as the country has already become the largest in terms of numbers of users and still has a huge potential in expanding the size of the market. WhatsApp currently counts over 400 million users in India and is now testing the lucrative market of digital payments, joining Google and Apple in this key market.

The minister said he has also asked the company to appoint a grievance officer for India to be based in India as the current position is based in the US. Cathcart said WhatsApp is focussed on making changes to its product to deal with 'virality', such as placing limits on the number of forwards. ‘‘We talked about the work we are doing to cooperate with law enforcement, put in place training, and handle requests,’’ he said. WhatsApp's ambitious payment services' blueprint in India has been caught in a bind over concerns around authentication and its data storage practices. In the past, its home-grown rivals have alleged that WhatsApp's payment platform has security risks for consumers and is not in compliance with the guidelines. In October last year, WhatsApp had said it had developed a system to store payments-related data in India as part of compliance with the regulator Reserve Bank of India's policy on storing such data locally.

After four years of an aggressive price-driven market acquisition strategy, Mukesh Ambani-backed Reliance Jio has emerged as the largest telecom company in India, based on the number of subscribers. Jio’s subscriber numbers stood at 331.3 million at the end of the last quarter on June 30, according to a company filing. Jio nudged ahead of Vodafone Idea which saw its numbers fall from 334.1 million to 320 million in the same period. Jio’s rapid growth is mainly thanks to the USD 36 billion that Ambani has poured into the telecom operator. Armed with the war chest, the company led an intensive competition, driving data tariffs in India to the lowest in the world.

Incidentally, Jio’s growth came just at the time when its rivals were groaning under unprecedented debts, which kept rising as the incumbents tried, in vain, to ward off the newbie by dropping their prices. Many of the firms have since either shut down or merged with rivals to stay afloat by sheer size. Jio’s market leadership comes at a time when it and others are testing 5G networks for a commercial launch next year.

TCS iON, a unit of India’s largest ITES firm, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has launched Skill Hub, a digital platform providing standardised, industry-relevant and digital content. It provides skilling, training, certification and job listing. This will allow the automotive sector in India to skill, re-skill and up-skill candidates at speed and scale.

“It (Skill Hub) is an important milestone for the country and we look forward to having both academia and industry leverage this digital platform and make skilling mainstream,” said Venguswamy Ramaswamy, global head of TCS iON. Skilling can be paid for through government sponsorship programmes, industry sponsorship or even individual candidates. The quality digital content will focus on industry-relevant subjects, aligned with Qualification Packs (QP) and National Occupation Standards (NOS). The ‘Phygital’ (digital solutions integrated with physical assets) delivery model will ensure fair and inclusive access to the platform. Physical assessments will be performed across 257 TCS locations identified specially for the Digital Hub. “The Digital Hub was built over the past 18 months and a separate vertical within TCS iON, consisting of a large employee base, focuses on skill training and assessment modules,” Ramaswamy added. The company is now in talks with stakeholders across tourism, hospitality, banking and financial services to provide similar skilling services on the platform. Almost 80 pc of the skilling requirements in the automotive domain are around services, sales and road. Transportation in roles like automotive service technician, sales consultants, showroom hostess/ hosts and vehicle drivers among others.

India’s cloud market has been growing at an exponential rate and notably in the government sector, with several global giants like Amazon, IBM and Microsoft getting empanelled with the government to be able to bid for business. Now, these heavy weights are joined in the hunt for lucrative orders, RailTel, a subsidiary of the Indian Railway. Its offering, RailCloud, is set to join the list of 14 cloud service providers empanelled by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeITy). The Ministry has advised its departments to store data in the data centres of firms on the empanelled list. “We have already applied to be empanelled with MeITy, and it is expected to be finalised in two months,” RailTel CMD Puneet Chawla told a newspaper. The demand for cloud has been propelled by demand from e-commerce, electronic payment mechanisms like credit card, social media and other enterprises. With the government proposing on norms mandating all the commercial data of these businesses to be hosted in India, the cloud market is slated to see unprecedented growth.

The Tata group is embracing artificial intelligence aggressively. Tata Capital, a financial services firm, has launched several AI-propelled platforms to simplify the local processes for the customers of group’s customers, including one for its own customers. The AI platforms are in the form of chatbots and voice assistants, taking over tasks previously handled by human employees at Tata Group. Tia, a personal loan assistant on Tata Capital app is to voice-assist the personal loan customer to check loan eligibility and aid the customer through the loan approval process within minutes.“It brings ease and convenience to the customer by providing a personalised and seamless experience,” says Abonty Banerjee, chief digital officer of Tata Capital, adding “Data through Tia is also used in a more meaningful manner, thus helping us create a far more delightful customer experience. We have been able to deepen our engagement with our customers as well. It helps to reduce the overall cost to serve in a significant manner and also is a good opportunity to up sell.”

Currently, over 25 pc of Tata Capital’s customers utilise the bot for loan assistance, instead of the traditional approach. Similarly, with Cara, a big number of TCS’ direct general HR inquiries have been taken off the hands of human employees, thus maximising their productivity by 40 pc, as per reports. Traditional industries such as manufacturing benefit too. “Richa has helped improve the productivity of ProCare (Procurement Helpdesk) by improving accuracy and speed of response to procedural queries,” a Tata Steel spokesperson told a newspaper.

Similarly, another Indian conglomerate, the Mahindra Group, is also deploying chatbots to takeover trivial tasks from humans. Tripper, Club Mahindra’s AI platform, interacts with members for holiday bookings and simple transactions via a chat interface. Mahindra’s automotive team has launched a personal voice assistant for customers to assist them during test drives and address model specific queries in multiple languages. Anish Shah, group president (strategy), told a newspaper, “Internal bots have resulted in a significant reduction in query resolution times, especially during peak seasons like the filing of income tax returns, salary days etc.’’

The group is also about to launch a chatbot for assisting customers of Mahindra Finance within the mutual fund space.“The chatbot intends to educate investors on mutual funds and service their queries, thus helping them avoid call centre queues. Additionally, it would be able to onboard as well as complete an entire investment journey for the customer with an integrated payment gateway,” Shah said. Similarly, Larsen &Toubro’s acquisition Mindtree has also begun a chat assistant to help manage functions such as HR, finance and travel. “As of now, it has already answered about 1,80,000 queries and this has saved manual hours, and in terms of people it has freed up people’s bandwidth by 45-50 pc. This automation has resulted in the query handling error rate coming down by more than 70 pc,” Kumar Visvanathan, head of people shared services at Mindtree, said.

Cognizant has roped in former Mphasis CEO Ganesh Ayyar to head the company’s digital operations. He will replace Sumithra Gomatam, who resigned earlier. Gomatam was the fourth high profile executive at Cognizant to resign in the last three months. Prasad Chintamaneni, Cognizant’s president for Industries & Consulting vertical, resigned in May, followed by Debashis Chatterjee, EVP and president of global delivery and Rajeev Mehta, president at the corporate level, resigned in April. Ayyar, who was with Mphasis from January 2009 to January 2017, had taken the company past USD1 billion in revenue. At Cognizant, Ayyar, as executive vice-president and head of Digital Operations, will lead a team of over 65,000 associates and serve nearly 150 strategic clients.

“After an extraordinary 24-year career with our company, Sumithra Gomatam, our EVP and president of Digital Operations and a member of the Executive Committee, has let me know of her plans to retire from Cognizant,” Cognizant CEO, Brian Humphries, announced in an e-mail communication to employees. Gomatam was driving strategy, market share, and mind share while growing businesses across IT and BPO services.