It’s been nearly a year since the acquisition. Could you highlight the key capabilities WNS brings to Capgemini?

This acquisition is a complementary partnership. We felt the combination of WNS’s strong domain knowledge and operational rigor, along with Capgemini’s strong understanding of technology, consulting, cloud, and infrastructure, strong balance sheet, and global presence, would be powerful in an era of agentic AI and intelligent operations. WNS brings knowledge of industry domains and subdomains, which will be critical while implementing more agentic AI and intelligent operations solutions for clients looking at new disruptive models to take to their end customers.  The integration is on the verge of being completed. There is a lot for the erstwhile WNS clients to gain from Capgemini and the strong capability they bring to the mix. But even more relevant is the unique capability that WNS’ own strength, because of its domain operational excellence, now brings to all customized clients across the globe. WNS is providing strong domain solutions in areas where Capgemini may not have had strong domain specialism. Currently, the discussion with clients is about AI orchestration. From the phase of experimentation, we have moved to complete enterprise adoption. This combination allows serious discussions with clients on both sides in terms of enterprise adoption. Capgemini has been announcing decent results over the past few quarters and has been providing credit to this acquisition in helping drive higher numbers for the overall group.

How is the BPM or outsourcing industry evolving because of AI?

In the past, there was a lot of focus on productivity. With all the changes,  the ability for us to create clarity for our customers and help them in areas they had not outsourced is high. The discussion has shifted from plain productivity and efficiency gains to continuous disruption. How are we managing, accelerating the market shifts, and building the core of our client companies for speed, resilience, and adaptability? When all this happens, we believe that the unlocking of intelligent operations and agentic AI, where we can now introduce an agent into a solution, allows customers to focus on what they are good at while enabling us to do what we are good at. Over time, this allows us to unlock a larger addressable market on the whole process and operation side. This is the most exciting story for the BPM and operations industry. People are no longer treating AI as just a transformation agenda. It has become a core business agenda for most companies.

What is the geographic footprint of your delivery centres across India and international markets? How is the AI wave changing clients’ decisions around delivery models?

As part of Capgemini, we operate in many countries. But globally, WNS has traditionally had many centers in India and operated from the Philippines, South Africa, Malaysia, Poland, Eastern Europe, and onshore facilities in North America and Europe, providing customers a strong capability to receive delivery near shore, onshore, and offshore. This is a big positive post the Capgemini acquisition of WNS, because now we can give a full suite of services to the customer.

The most important discussion is how customers want to deal with the disruption around AI. There are many confusing choices between platforms, partnerships with hyperscalers, understanding some frontier companies, and prioritizing focus areas. Should they be focused on their end customer, or on these decisions? Customers have realized that while this trend is positive for them and the world at large, their ability to introduce agentic AI models and operations will be limited. That is where they want strong partners to help in these journeys. Therefore, the decision is less about which location, but more about the value delivered to the client. Based on the value and how it is delivered, a choice will be made between near shore, onshore, and offshore. Ultimately, talent will be an important part of this discussion. And in terms of scale, no country scores better than India. With the implementation of AI, the biggest challenge is not the technology part, but the availability of trained AI resources. India is investing in that area to stay ahead of the curve.

How is AI reshaping talent demand within your organization? As BPM moves beyond the traditional labor-arbitrage model, what new AI-related roles are emerging?

We cannot paint the entire BPM industry with one broad brush. There are different players in the industry. Some focus on voice while others focus on low-end repeatable tasks. Some have moved to knowledge processing, outsourcing -- more to domain-based operations, driven through platforms and strong investments in technology. WNS belongs to the third category.

Players focused on the low-end tasks, like voice, are being disrupted by smart technologies, because there’s no differentiation offered there. In our case, we ensure that the man behind the machine is important because in many processes we deliver, whether on a standalone basis or even for Capgemini post integration, trust will play an important part for the end customer. As you implement more agentic AI solutions, the first thing is to build trust with internal stakeholders and employees so they can depend on the solution the agent is providing. The core is the people. Therefore, training, skilling, and upskilling, in terms of the deployment, design, and operation of AI systems, from day one, will be critical. The focus will be on creating trusted AI solutions and operating models for customers. It’s early days in the AI journey. There is huge potential.

With every wave of disruption, like Y2K, the pandemic, and financial crises, we have been able to position talent differently. Each time, the industry felt there would be a problem for the talent turned out to be a tailwind for both. The industry kept growing faster, which remains the same even here. On one side, technology will make certain roles redundant and move people into different roles. But there will be overall growth. Second, new solutions open up a larger TAM. There remains a significant untapped opportunity in the market, with substantial scope for organizations to further leverage outsourcing, intelligent operations, and AI-led transformation. As adoption expands, it can create new roles and opportunities across the ecosystem. The key will be how quickly organizations can drive adoption, build the right talent and capabilities, and bring together domain expertise, digital technologies, and data to deliver meaningful business outcomes for customers.

Following the integration, have there been any headcount reductions, or is the focus now on hiring and expanding talent across the combined organisation?

This integration of the two companies is helping create a strong pipeline and momentum for growth in the long term. We believe that, at least for the foreseeable future, based on the sales momentum created, we’ll continue to grow well and also hire in certain geographies. We will need many more data scientists, deep domain experts, and forward-deployed engineers, among others. We will need more talent with expertise in frontier technologies who can collaborate with hyperscalers and build solutions that are accretive to our revenue and margins. It’s an exciting future for talent post this integration as well.