MUMBAI, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Indian IT firms need to

rethink how they operate and the country needs to create its own

language models as artificial intelligence technologies disrupt

the sector, according to HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar.

The generative AI boom has threatened to disrupt business

models for Indian IT companies that largely serve clients in the

United States for operations support, providing software as a

service.

"The underlying themes are not the same as cloud and

digitization and other things ... This is very different. The

changes that AI is assuring are very different, and we need to

be more proactive to even categorize our revenues to create

completely new businesses," Vijayakumar said at an industry

event in Mumbai.

Generative AI, which can write code for software among a

plethora of tasks, is expected to speed up the timeline to

develop products, improving efficiency of a company's workforce.

For an example, a five-year technology transformational

program valued at about $1 billion at a very large financial

services firm could be done in three-and-a-half years,

Vijayakumar said.

He also said India should build its own language models to

cut down dependency on other countries and avoid impact from

geopolitical issues.

Large language models are trained on massive amounts of data

to generate text and other content.

"We should not assume that these (language) models will

continue to be open source. I think these are going to be the

coins on which the geopolitics is going to be played off,"

Vijayakumar said, adding that countries could limit some usage

beyond their boundaries.

"To have a long-term competitive advantage, it makes a lot

of sense to build and the costs are coming down. We need to find

ways to very economically create a training infrastructure to

train the models," he said.

IT industry executives also said the sector needs to avoid

complacency to adapt and overcome challenges.

"I think we have to be paranoid. We have to be

non-complacent. That is the way we can manage to keep up with

what's going on in the industry," Infosys CEO Salil

Parekh said.