Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:04):
We are at DTW Ignite 2024. We're in the sunny capital city of Copenhagen. I'm here with Mohit Joshi, who is CEO and MD of Tech Mahindra. Mohit, thanks so much for joining us today. Good to see you.

Mohit Joshi, Tech Mahindra (00:17):
Thank you, Ray. It's wonderful to be here, and as you said, it's a beautiful sunny day. The best time of the year to be in Copenhagen.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:23):
Absolutely. Now, Tech Mahindra is here at the event with its slogan "Scale at Speed". What does that mean for the company, for your customers, for your partners?

Mohit Joshi, Tech Mahindra (00:35):
So scale at speed is our new strategic narrative, right? The way we think about the way technology and operations is being consumed by the largest companies in the world is that there is a need for scale at speed. And historically, you almost had a binary choice between scale. So think about it as assembling a large land army or speed. Think about special forces now with the consumerization of technology, with changing demographics, with geopolitics, with AI, you need scale at speed. And we felt it was a wonderful and very compelling narrative, and especially for us, given the importance of telco to the tech end business, we felt it was a very important narrative for the industry as well.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:17):
Now, there's a lot of talk here at this event about how the service providers need to find new revenue streams, et cetera, but at the same time, they need to be managing their costs more. How can Tech Mahindra help them to manage their OpEx and help them keep that down as data volumes go up?

Mohit Joshi, Tech Mahindra (01:37):
Absolutely. Look, I think the economics for the telco business have been challenging for a while, and clearly with interest rates going up with, especially in the Western world, not too much of a subscriber edition and the huge investments that have gone into the network and the 5G, the economics are a little bit challenging. The way we think about it is it is simplify, modernize, and monetize. So simplify your and modernize your existing stack. Look at your OpEx again, but also look at new monetization opportunities. For instance, we feel that open APIs are going to give us significant monetization opportunity. Look at reducing their churn in your business. Look at increasing the RPU per customer. And we feel that at Tech Mahindra we have a unique combination of services capability that can help you simplify and modernize. But we also have a significant number of software assets with Conviva, which can really help you monetize it. We have a very strong marketing analytics platform, a very strong BSS platform that gives significant monetization opportunities for the telcos.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:44):
Now, of course, one of the big topics at this and every other telecom event is artificial intelligence. It's on everybody's lips. How does AI fit into the Tech Mahindra strategy and how can you help the service providers with their AI strategies?

Mohit Joshi, Tech Mahindra (03:02):
I think AI is a very fascinating topic because AI obviously is all pervading. The way we think about AI is that there are some AI use cases that are really happening across industries. So whether it's financial services or healthcare or telecom, you have use cases around customer service, for instance, and digital deflection. You've got use cases around cybersecurity. You've got use cases around talent, and you've got use cases around developer productivity. So these are the use cases that are pretty much horizontal and across the board, but then you've got specific vertical use cases for the telecom industry, for instance, we think the energy consumption of the network is a very powerful use case for applying AI. So we are thinking about what are the horizontal and vertical cases for AI and for telcos, we've got a hundred plus use cases that can be applied. So that's one piece of it.

(03:50):
The second piece I'll mention is that Tech Mahindra is also making a very significant investment from a research perspective. We are, to the best of my knowledge, the only service provider that has built its own large language models ground up, right? So we built a large language model for Indian languages and now for Bahasa Indonesian that has been built ground up. So we collected the data, done the optimization, got billions of parameters and are now testing the model. So that gives us a very strong foundation. And the final thing I'll mention from an AI perspective, which I think is really important because a lot of people are talking about UI AI use cases, but people haven't built the validation and testing frameworks to be able to take these use cases up to industrial scale. And we are investing in building a very strong validation framework for the industry so that you can go beyond pilots to enterprise use case adoption.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:43):
Well, that sounds like a very worthwhile focus because you can't go into this blind and not know what's going to happen once you implement.

Mohit Joshi, Tech Mahindra (04:50):
Exactly, exactly.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:52):
Mohit, pleasure to speak to you. Thanks very much for joining us today.

Mohit Joshi, Tech Mahindra (04:54):
Thank you, Ray. Thank you for your time.