The ‘bot coolie’ trap

IT FIRMS MUSTAVOID REPLICATING THE LOW-COST IT SERVICES MODELIN THE AI SPACE

- SUDHIR CHOWDHARY

BACK INTHE early 2000s, Indian IT workers engaged in low-end, repetitive, and routinised tasks — especially in call centres and BPOs— were often described as cyber coolies.

Is this infamous term raising its head in the age of AI too? As bot coolies? Despite a growing pool of engineers and tech talent, the tech industry has lagged in creating foundational models. Many IT companies are more focused on applied/custom AI services than cutting-edge foundational research. A lot of their work is about building and deploying AI solutions for clients, rather than doing pure research.

"It is true that compared to the US and China, we have been late innovators in AI but our future will lie in applications and adaptation which has long been our forte,” says Ganesh Natarajan, chairman, GTT Data Solutions & 5F World.

“Our decades of business skills must be brought to think through new end-to-end processes for organisations, train consultants in prompt engineering and GenAI and technologists to design and deploy AI agents across the value chain,’ he adds.