Despite macroeconomic concerns, Wipro bullish on IT’s long-term prospects

Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji said that despite current global macroeconomic concerns, he is extremely bullish about the long-term prospects of the IT Services industry. At the Karnataka government’s Global Investors Meet 2022, Premji said that Indian IT has grown from a low-cost offshoring destination to a “true technology and business partner for every business.”

“My confidence is driven by two things — the rapid pace of digitisation across the world and the shift in the mindset of stakeholders who engage with us as an industry,” he said.

Speaking about the talent crunch in the tech industry, Premji said India is where the standard is.

“Our challenge is to find this talent and leverage it to fulfil the demand we see. We have seen the high numbers of attrition that the industry is currently facing. It is because we are all chasing the same pool of talent. Instead, what we need to do is to find new locations and new sources of talent,” he said.

Premji said that the pandemic has shown that work can be done remotely and at scale.

“This will make it easier to widen the talent pool, especially women and people with disabilities who will benefit from the flexibility of remote work,” he said.

The Wipro Chairman said that while the country has a very large number of skilled young workers and the largest number of engineers in the world, talent was forced to migrate to cities for jobs instead of companies going to where the talent is.

“This limits the talent pool and puts a huge strain on infrastructure in big cities, pushing up the cost of living and arguably even hurting our environment,” he added. Moneycontrol