Tech Aficionado: Harrick Vin, CTO, TCS The IT giant is creating an impact in industries such as banking, education, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, retail, energy, life science, public services, travel & logistics
By Shrabona Ghosh •
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Over the past 30 years, Harrick Vin has been creating novel solutions in various sectors of computing. He had pioneered the world's first cognitive automation product for enterprises in the year 2015. His innovations led to three venture-backed startups in the US, and Digitate, a Tata Consultancy Services Venture. Currently, Vin is the chief technology officer (CTO) of TCS. Under his aegis, digital transformation is all about redefining businesses. "We leverage digital technologies to drive business redefinition along four dimensions:Improve the time, cost and quality of today's products and services; define and operationalize new business capabilities to create additional value for the current customers; build new methods to improve distribution of the current set of services to consumers and finally design new sets to penetrate completely newer markets. We operationalize these at different time horizons, often driving these transformation activities in parallel," said the CTO.
Banking, education, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, retail, energy, life science, public services, travel & logistics are industries where the IT giant is creating an impact. "Our offerings generate significant new value for our enterprise customers and create new business opportunities and revenue streams for TCS," Vin added.
Among the new- age technologies, AI/GenAI space is revolutionizing the tech realm. "Our innovation activities in AI/GenAI is focused primarily on two areas, firstly, building methods and platforms to enable enterprises to build and scale deployments of AI-led solutions and secondly, developing novel AI-first solutions for variety of business functions (specific to an industry or ones that span across industry domains)," he said.
Explaining how its tech stack affects cost and productivity, he said, "It definitely improves knowledge, work productivity and costs. The bigger impact, however, is likely to be in leveraging AI-powered solutions to improve the quality of knowledge work outputs and outcomes."
While technology offers significant opportunities, building and scaling AI-first solutions for large enterprises is not easy (both technologically and for driving organizational changes) and is an artform today.
With expanding threat perimeters in the digital world, cybersecurity is no longer just about compliance and risk mitigation—it is a growth imperative. Through its cybersecurity services, TCS helps companies to optimize security investments, ensure digital trust, accelerate Cloud transformation, protect customer data, enhance digital ecosystem security, meet regulatory compliance and reduce total cost of ownership. "In cybersecurity, we are innovating along two key dimensions: using machine intelligence and AI for cyber security and developing novel methods for securing AI itself," he explained.
TCS is looking at business redefinition holistically and is exploring ways to redefine talent engagement. It is augmenting its focus on imparting new technology skills with novel ways of nurturing an ever-growing and adaptive pool of specialists.
Vin has the ability to decipher signals from noise, formulate a strategy, plan intuitively and adapt fast. Sharing his secret to winning, he said, "These abilities when combined with continuous learning makes winning a certainty and not a matter of chance.
Tech outlook for 2024
GenAI: The sophistication of GenAI (large language models) will accelerate
LLMs: LLMs will become capable of performing more complex activities with greater reasoning abilities and also cover more modalities (text to anything), accelerating pace of innovation for all domains of knowledge work.
Cybersecurity: Through its cybersecurity services, TCS helps companies to optimize security investments, ensure digital trust, accelerate Cloud transformation, protect customer data, enhance digital ecosystem security, meet regulatory compliance and reduce total cost of ownership.
