Nagarro, a global technology business, has disclosed aggressive ambitions to capitalise on the expanding artificial intelligence (AI) sector by introducing new solutions to the African market, with South Africa serving as the continent's primary foothold.
Nagarro, which entered the South African market five years ago, says to be growing its artificial intelligence initiatives and has now increased its SA operations workers to over 600.
In a recent interview with ITWeb Africa, Nagarro's Indian-based director, Khimanand Upreti, discussed the company's AI strategy, which concentrates on delivering optimised business solutions that dramatically boost efficiency, with a 40-50% improvement over traditional methods.
Upreti said the company has successfully implemented an automated solution that generates test cases from product requirements, resulting in a 40-45% productivity increase.
AI promotes competitiveness
To remain competitive, Nagarro, according to Upreti, has built an AI innovation lab to investigate global trends and develop unique solutions, such as a self-healing test automation system that cuts maintenance time by 60-70%.
During the discussion, Upreti also addressed ethical considerations in AI deployment, emphasising the significance of using unbiased training data and carrying out regular audits to ensure fair decision-making.
He went on to emphasise that AI will create more job opportunities and necessitate re-skilling rather than displacing workers, with a vision for integrating AI throughout the quality engineering lifecycle.
Plans to introduce these AI solutions to various industries in South Africa and the continent at large came up during the interview.
“We are very actively going to bring a lot of these components to South African customers and South African market across industry that includes the banking industry, the insurance industry, the retail, e-commerce, automotive, and different types of industry,” Upreti said.
He continued: “So basically our AI strategy is to create that can bring more optimisation and efficiency to business problem solving.
“We basically want to support businesses to deliver fast with high quality in most optimized way. To reach to this goal, within Nagarro Quality Engineering, we have created multiple solutions.
“For example, we have a solution which can create the business use cases and business test cases of products completely automatically from product requirements. This solution takes input, the requirements of the product, and in the output we have test cases, functional test cases, and automation scripts written within seconds.”
Upreti went on to say: “So this adds a lot of efficiency in test case writing and test case design. We have seen that our quality engineers are approximately 40, 45% more productive with this solution. And this solution uses large language model and Gen AI concept.
“It basically adds to the efficiency of quality engineers. This solution is in production time. The beauty of, let's say, the overall AI vision and the AI goal that we have is that we have done significant work already in this area.
“We have solutions that are already our customers using those solutions. They are already benefiting those solutions. And our idea is to bring those solutions now to also South African market and also South African customers, of course, and see if we can, you know, add the optimization and efficiency in business product delivery.”
Jobs are safe with AI
Turning to the potential of AI displacing workers or replacing workers through AI automation, Upreti responded: “See, AI is very powerful, but I think that AI will probably bring in more opportunities and the workers will still have a lot of work to do, but they will have to re-skill themselves.
You know, when we we look at a business problem, for example, the business problem is typically a combination of a lot of tasks, a lot of small tasks that, you know, combine together. When we look at a business solution, it's basically a combination of a lot of small tasks. Now, let's say without AI, all of those tasks are done by humans.
“With AI, some of those tasks will probably be done by AI algorithms. Like I was mentioning, the test case writing, the business use case writing will be done by some algorithm.
“But that does not mean that the human is completely out of the loop. The human has to look at the output, validate the comprehensiveness of the output, validate the accuracy of the output, and things like that.
“So I think at least now, or also in the future, I think the chances of replacing AI are probably low. Maybe 15 years down the line, I don't know what happens.
“From my point of view, it brings more opportunities. It makes us more powerful, more efficient in terms of delivering solutions to businesses. We can be more efficient. We just have to learn this technology and use it to our advantage.”
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