Genpact's AI chief Vijayasankar: Don't forget process, talent debt in AI projects

Enterprises need to overhaul their structure to truly generate business outcomes from AI, but first need to focus on the basics holding them back: Tech debt, talent debt and process debt.

Speaking at Constellation Research's AI Forum, Vijay Vijayasankar, Global Agentic AI Officer at Genpact, said the IT debt issue is well known. What's overlooked is process debt and talent debt.

Vijayasankar previously held leadership roles at IBM Consulting, MongoDB and SAP. In other words, he's spent his career helping companies transform.

"There's a lot of discussion on these topics. Many CIOs and CTOs have convinced their CEOs and CFOs to spend money on that. Now, this is a sin that has been committed for a long time, so it's not like in the next one year, you know, people will overcome all that debt. But the part of the debt that does not get talked about very much is the process debt and the talent debt," said Vijayasankar.

He added:

"The process debt is there because there was no AI in the past. Any workflow that has been created pre-AI had no idea that oh there is this possibility that software can think and software can act. This is new. So consequently, you cannot sprinkle AI on top of an old workflow and expect magic to happen. It's not horse to the first automobile; it's horse to the you know self-driving car."

Vijayasankar said operating models need to change. On the talent front, enterprises need to think through what humans bring to the table. According to Vijayasankar, humans bring judgement. Knowing code doesn't make an engineer. A procurement person excels because of judgement not Excel.

"The idea is that you have to train people differently and you'll have to compensate them differently. It's not just about effort. You'll have to hold them to an outcome," he said. "Process debt and talent debt doesn't get the attention it deserves. Tech and data debt will be addressed because it has been addressed for the last 10 years."

Other takeaways from Vijayasankar:

• Vijayasankar said the AI use cases haven't surprised him because Genpact is focused on core enterprise operations like finance, accounting and supply chain. "The business process itself doesn't change and we consciously choose to work on what we know how to optimize," he said.
• But the outcomes have been surprising. "The outcomes from AI have been significantly better than I expected. Like the duplicates payment problem has been around forever. Just by putting agentic AI solutions in we've seen results," said Vijayasankar. "The scale of these benefits have definitely surprised me."
• Change management kills AI projects. Vijayasankar said change management is where projects go to die. "It's not really the technology. The models are good enough, but the innovation is choked. The ability to rewire an organization is difficult," he said.