TCS’s artificial intelligence project arrives onboard; lifts industry’s hopes

Tata Consultancy Service’s newest product, Ignio, a neural automation system under development for four years is now finally out.

The announcement was made by TCS vice-president and chief scientist Harrick Vin, who described Ignio as Neo in Matrix while delivering his speech.

Vin said, “Have you seen the Matrix? Remember the scene where Neo and Trinity get into a helicopter and don't know how to fly it. So Neo just downloads the instructions into his brain and they're off? This product is exactly like that."

As per an Economic Times report, Ignio uses what TCS calls neural computing — a platform backed by machine-learning capabilities and the computing power of the cloud that is meant to handle a lot of the work currently being done in managing IT infrastructure.

"We call this service-as-a-software. The old cloud platforms were software-as-a-service but this is a new paradigm. Service-as-a-software is where you have a set of people doing certain services like a compliance check — now Ignio can do that automatically," N Chandrasekaran, chief executive of TCS, explains.

Now Akhilesh Tripathi is also associated with project Ignio, and TCS is also planning to form a separate sales team for it. Tripathi was earlier TCS Canada’s before he joined the project Ignio.

"Initially, it is not going to be about revenue, or just the number of clients. It's going to be about the adoption within clients. That's what we are focusing on," Chandrasekaran informs.