Cognizant’s Whale of a boost for Indian IT Services Industry’s continued Salience

Not everyone is expected to know that the oldest ancestor of the whale was a wolf-shaped animal that waddled around on hooved legs in present-day Pakistan 50 million years ago. But most people are aware that the survival of the whale is at risk from climate change, collisions with ships, and increasingly frequent mass beaching episodes for reasons not yet understood, with the butchery of these giants of the sea for meat having been discontinued for the most part.

Cognizant Technologies, one of India’s Information Technology service majors, has developed an Artificial Intelligence agent, dubbed WhaleAgent, which seeks to use AI to better predict the presence of whales at specific locations, collating and analysing data from past patterns of whale migrations, plankton density, ocean currents and acidification, temperature of ocean waters, and satellite images.

This will add to assorted efforts underway to minimise ship-whale collisions grouped together under WhaleSafe.

This, definitely, is good news for Cognizant, and probably for whales.

It is also good news and grand advertising for India’s Information Technology services as an industry. Late in February, software stocks had tanked, following the news that Anthropic, creator of the powerful Claude foundation model, had released several AI tools that could perform advanced coding, reasoning and knowledge work. Many investors took the announcement to mean that AI could do a lot of what software services companies deliver for their clients, and that the growing capability of AI would make software services companies obsolete.

The inference was explicitly disputed by flagbearers of the AI revolution, such as NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, but has not quite disappeared from the nightmares that lurk in the investor subconscious, however irrational these might be. Developments like vibe coding, in which people with no technical training but have clarity of thought and communication can create software with the help of AI chatbots, give these fears an extended half-life.

Enter the whale, or, rather, the WhaleAgent. This is a concrete example of a software services company creating an AI tool to keep whales safe, not because anyone has paid them to do it, but because it is a good thing to do and because the company can do it.

The simple fact is that Indian IT majors have been using AI tools for years, even before AI began to send company valuations into the stratosphere. TCS, for example, had been identifying when and which part needed preventive maintenance for GE’s aircraft engines, analysing the data captured from assorted sensors on engine performance. This shifted engine maintenance from fixed periodicity to allow for optimal length of engine service between maintenance operations. This was when N Chandrasekaran was still the boss of just TCS in the Tata Group.

Certainly, AI can create code. However, it is best wielded by a trained software engineer to achieve both scale and optimal software size while minimising run time. India’s IT services companies deploy not just a bunch of coders, but people trained to understand the domain and create code that is most appropriate to solve problems of the domain. This capability stems from business savvy and understanding of corporate decision-making processes and structures. AI does not come equipped with such endowments.

AI will certainly impact software companies.

But the effect is more likely to take the form of making them more productive than to make them redundant. However, the manpower requirement of these companies could be negatively impacted. That is a problem for India’s job seekers and usual patterns of social mobility, not for the software companies themselves.

Right now, we are at a juncture where the awesome power of AI is being revealed, but not enough new applications of AI to create new industries altogether have been developed. To take a historical example, this is comparable to the moment when the internal combustion engine and a motor vehicle powered by it have been proven possible, potentially endangering the horse-drawn carriage ecosystem, but new automobile, rubber-tyre, and petroleum refining and dispensing industries have not yet come into being.

Certainly, AI is a paradigm-shifting technology. Great destroyer, it will be, but simultaneously, it will also be creator on a grand scale. Routine jobs of many kinds would disappear. But software service companies will not be among those destroyed. It is time to stop worrying and start exploring new possibilities. The point is to reimagine education from the ground up to equip our young to think critically, and for young people to use AI tools as a matter of routine.

AI will create many new activities and deliver many useful things. Improved whale safety would be just one example.