One Thing Today in Tech

In today’s episode, Yugal Joshi, a partner at Everest Group, a research and advisory company, talks about how the world of tech services is changing rapidly. The expectation is that what was manual and time-consuming yesterday should be codified and efficient today. Value is to be had at incrementally higher levels of abstraction and outcomes will matter much more than the tech under the hood. The...

In this episode, Kamal Karanth, co-founder and CEO of Xpheno, a staffing firm in Bengaluru, explains the modest increase in open IT positions in recent times. Consider that in FY22, the IT sector alone hired some 2,30,000 people, net, according to the industry lobby Nasscom. That fell to 60,000 in FY23 and FY24 was about the same. Not much has changed yet for the IT giants, but non-tech companies...

In this episode, Sumeet Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Leadership Boulevard, more popularly known as Leadschool, offers a quick update on the company’s latest product. Techbook, as they’re calling it, is actually a physical textbook, designed and engineered to comprise scannable pages that link up with an AR solution. This opens up a world of interactive content for students, and, alongside an AI-ba...

Sridhar Vembu, co-founder and CEO of Zoho, offers a quick update on the AI investments at India’s biggest software products company. In an interview with Forbes India at the company’s annual user conference on Sep. 25, Vembu spoke about small models Zoho has commercialized, efforts to ensure enterprise customers’ security and privacy in putting such models to use across different functions and cus...

AI products and services will likely grow between 40 percent and 55 percent annually, potentially reaching $990 billion by 2027, the consultancy Bain & Company projects in its fifth annual global technology report. In this episode, David Crawford, a partner and chairman of the consultancy’s global technology practice, discusses some of the top takeaways from the report – including whether AI i...

In this episode, Sidu Ponnappa, co-founder and CEO of Realfast, unpacks the hype cycle, challenges and opportunities in ‘agentic AI.’ Realfast, a Singapore and Bengaluru startup, recently out of stealth mode, is initially offering AI assistants to Salesforce implementation services teams. In this quick chat, Ponnappa also talks about the intangible human experience that’s often discounted in conve...

The leaders of the Quad nations, Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India, Anthony Albanese of Australia, and Kishida Fumio of Japan, and US President Joe Biden unveiled the Quad Cancer Moonshot, a collaborative effort in the Indo-Pacific region, in a statement called The Wilmington Declaration, on Sep. 21. This partnership will initially focus on cervical cancer, which the leaders note is a prevent...

Is the enterprise opportunity on the rise in the world of augmented reality, or AR? Just this week, Microsoft, maker of HoloLens, has announced a partnership with Anduril, the US deep-tech defence startup founded by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus headset, now part of Meta, and Snap has released the latest version of its AR Spectacles. To understand the landscape better, we speak with Mi...

How satisfied are enterprise customers with the results of their outsourcing investments when it comes to generative AI? Mrinal Rai, assistant director and principal analyst at ISG, unpacks what the technology sourcing and advisory company’s customers are saying about this. Rai, who leads research for the future of work and enterprise customer experience at ISG, adds that irrespective of current c...

Microsoft has unveiled new AI features in its Copilot product. The features started rolling out this week and Microsoft also announced a large deal with Vodafone Group under which 68,000 or about two-thirds of the British mobile services provider’s employees will get licensed access to the new Copilot. Among the features are Copilot Pages, deeper integration of Copilot within Microsoft’s Office pr...

In today’s episode, we bring you an update from Nakul Aggarwal, co-founder and CTO of BrowserStack, a leading SaaS company from India, providing software app and browser testing infrastructure and products. Aggarwal talks about the rationale behind the acquisition of Bird Eats Bug, in Berlin, which BrowserStack announced yesterday. He also talks about evaluating building BrowserStack’s own large l...

Ahead of Nvidia’s fiscal Q2 earnings results, on Aug. 28 (Aug. 29, 2:30 a.m. local time in India) we look at the stunning rise of the $2 trillion chip maker as the tech backbone for the explosion of generative AI over the last two years. Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester Research, and Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, explain Nvidia’s dominan...

Apple, as widely anticipated leading up to its annual Worldwide Developer Conference, announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to the iPhone, iPad and MacBooks. The tie up evoked strident criticism from Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, in particular around data privacy. In this episode, Jaspreet Bindra, an independent AI and ethics researcher and former chief digital officer of t...

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC, kicks off later today, and anticipation is high with respect to the iPhone maker’s AI roadmap, as it is generally considered to lag Android rivals such as Samsung and Google – especially in the era of generative AI. Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, and Navkendar Singh, associate vice president at...

Access to talent, value and innovation – these are all reasons that multinational companies are either setting up IT and software-driven R&D centres in India or expanding existing facilities. Some, however, are reducing the workforce in such centres and there’s also a set of companies considering exiting their GCCs altogether. To understand what’s going on, I spoke with Stanton Jones, Distingu...

In this episode, Megha Chawla, senior partner at the multinational consultancy Bain & Company, talks about why India’s tech talent has become a non-negotiable part of the global CEO’s strategy, discussing the prospects for the nation’s tech landscape, as India returns to a coalition government at the centre after a decade. In the age of AI, India’s IT services companies have become important p...

Indian voters have denied a majority to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP. However, as Modi is set to remain in power for a historic third term, leading the coalition NDA, three well-known VC investors unpack what this means for India’s tech and startup ecosystem. Ninad Karpe, founding partner at 100X.VC, in Mumbai, Abhishek Goyal, co-founder of Tracxn and angel investor, in Bengaluru, and Vishes...

Agnikul Cosmos, a space launch vehicle startup in Chennai, yesterday successfully tested its first technology demonstrator rocket, Agnibaan, that showed its one-piece 3D-printed engine worked as intended, in a sub-orbital mission. To understand the significance of this success, Forbes India spoke with Narayan Prasad, chief operations officer at Satsearch, a Netherlands headquartered marketplace fo...

A year after it first announced the plan, the Reserve Bank of India yesterday launched a Fintech Repository that the regulator hopes will foster innovation by allowing it to stay abreast of the cutting edge of tech in the industry. To get a sense of why fintech entrepreneurs are welcoming this move, Forbes India spoke with Manish Kumar, co-founder and CEO of KredX, a startup specializing in supply...

The demand for data centres in India is surging, driven by everything from the expansion of the so-called global capability centres to the rise of our digital economy and the laws around localization of data as required under the data protection rules. In this episode, Arjun P Gupta, founder and CEO of Smart Joules, in New Delhi, which provides HVAC management and energy efficiency solutions, offe...

Google’s large investment in Flipkart comes as a pleasant surprise even to seasoned investors in India’s digital economy – at a time when late-stage funding is yet to return, and the funding winter continues even as the monsoons will be a welcome relief from record heat waves across the subcontinent.  Abhishek Goyal, co-founder of Tracxn, and an early investor in Flipkart, reckons the deal could b...

Google is reportedly ready to make its Pixel phones in India, starting with the Pixel 8 to be assembled at a Foxconn International plant in Tamil Nadu. Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, and Navkendar Singh, associate vice president at IDC India, unpack the big picture here. Google is starting small, but has the heft to scale in a massive market by sheer nu...

Why are some of India’s best-known fintech startups, but also others, engaging in what is popularly called a “reverse flip” to move their holding parent entities back to India from countries such as the US, Singapore and so on. It can be a fairly complex, time-consuming process, but these companies – Groww, PineLabs and Razorpay are in the news – feel it’s worth the trouble. In this episode, Keyur...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offered a glimpse into his plan for how the company will bring AI to everyone – via its Copilot stack on its Azure cloud platform, keynoting the company’s 14th edition of its annual developer conference, Build, on May 21. In this episode, Sidhant Rastogi, president for technology services and platforms at Zinnov, a management consultancy, and Deepika Giri, associate vic...

A report last week from Tata Consultancy Services on “AI for Business” revealed some of the barriers to achieving the so-called “transformation” that large companies seek, in implementing new tech and processes – especially generative AI in this case. So where does the IT services industry really stand with respect to generative AI as an opportunity for serious growth. Yugal Joshi, a partner at Ev...