Wipro is India’s third largest information technology services company. In 2015, its CEO (TK Kurien) stated a hard-driving plan of reducing $300 million from the company’s cost of operations through hyper automation.

With ServiceNXT umbrella, the integrated managed services offering wherein Wipro will build its AI platforms. Kurien stresses that this choice will eventually lead the company into cutting costs – reaching his set target.

Significantly, $300 million represents 5-6% of Wipro’s cost. It was Wipro’s first step into automation. A bet they didn’t have the certainty to succeed.

In an interview by Times of India, Kurien said, “I won’t deny the fact that there was a number like that. The biggest opportunity we have is the NextGen initiative. Fundamentally, what we are doing is taking the artificial intelligence platforms, putting them together and actually reducing the amount of labour that is supplied for a job.”

This challenge was in the hands of Abid Ali Nemuuchwala, then COO.

Now in 2016, Wipro has reaped its rewards and decided to drive hyper automation across all projects in FY17. This time, the objective is not only to improve productivity through non-linearity, but also to position as a new way of service delivery disrupting traditional IT delivery model through cognitive artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA).

“In FY 2015-2016, we have done successful Proof-of-Concept (PoC) in this (hyper automation) area across large clients. In FY 2016-2017, we plan to do large scale roll out across various archetypes, namely infrastructure and application managed services, application development and testing services,” the company said in its annual report filed with the US market regulator, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

With this decision, Wipro aims to release around 4,500 people during FY 2016-17.

Wipro has also invested in a cognitive AI platform called, Holmes. Holmes is focused on solving enterprise business use cases using cognition into IT and business processes.

“We have formed a dedicated unit to drive non-linear revenue growth by leveraging IP-based products, platforms and solutions as well as through automation and innovative commercial constructs and delivery models,” the company added.

Now CEO, Neemuchwala, has set an ambitious target of taking the company’s revenues to $15 billion with an operating margin of 23 per cent by 2020.