India’s $142 billion IT  industry employing 4 million people so far depended upon the addition of manpower to deal with additional business — for every additional $1 billion business, they need 14000 more engineers in 2014-15. To tackle this linear model, the industry is trying to depend more and more on machine learning, automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. It results into more revenues with less employees. This helps the shrinking bottom line of the IT companies.

Cognizant has rolled out AI-based automation across thousands of customer projects. So far Cognizant lead two platforms — ADPART and Automatika. ADPART is patented alogorithm. It automates test cases, and learns from past defects stored in the defect libraries. It intelligently predicts the most vulnerable business processes. Automatika is used in BPOs. It uses proprietary algorithm for natural language processing and machine learning to automate manual tasks, e.g. analyzing, searching, extracting and organizing information from different unstructured sources. Cognizant acquired TriZeta in 2014 which has HPA or Health Process Automation platform. HPA is used to process insurance claims with one robotic global manager which delegates work actions to individual robots. Each robot is assigned a different claim to process. The researchers are working to extend HPA’s use to different verticals.

All this raises the classic debate of man vs. machine. Attrition will be combined with the recruitment of a lower head-count. It will cushion the march to non-linearity.

In next five years, all IT firms are marching towards greater automation. The faster ones will have better revenues per employee and better profit