C P Gurnani and the contrarian stance

• ‘Challenge accepted,’ said Gurnani to ChatGPT maker OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who had said it was totally hopeless to compete with his company on training foundational AI models.
• Gurnani has taken a contrarian stance to that of the industry recently on the moonlighting issue.
• He had created a unique approach to downsizing when his company took over troubled Satyam Computers.
  

Come December, C P Gurnani is all set to hang his boots as Tech Mahindra’s CEO, but that’s not making him take a back seat. Unlike most tech CEOs and other top leaders in general, he is unafraid to speak his mind.

So much so that Gurnani made OpenAI CEO Sam Altman back down and clarify his comments that it’s hopeless for India to compete with his company on AI. The first to respond was Gurnani who ‘accepted a challenge’ on behalf of India — to create a ChatGPT-like product.

“From one CEO to another, challenge accepted,” Gurnani said after Altman said, “The way this works is we're going to tell you, it’s totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundational models, you shouldn’t try and it’s your job to try anyways,” responding to a question on the capability of small team of Indians to try it.

Altman’s comments, however, ended up reportedly offending the likes of minister of state for IT and electronics, Rajeev Chandrasekhar. Meanwhile, the 64-year-old Gurnani, never one to shy away from taking on challenges or voicing his opinions, however contrary — has taken the bull by the horn one more time.

A votary of moonlighting

Not too long ago, when moonlighting was a hot debate, almost every tech major including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys opposed it calling it an ‘ethical issue’. In fact, Wipro’s executive chairman Rishad Premji was a vocal opponent, claiming to have fired people for taking up side hustles while being employed with the company and ‘working’ from home.

Amidst a sea of dissent, Gurnani was one of the first voices who supported moonlighting – only asking his employees to be open about it. He asked them not to cover up the extra work as it would aid their resumes.

“If you go by my word, if someone is meeting the efficiency and productivity norms, and he wants to make some extra money as long as he is not committing fraud, he is not doing something against the values and ethics of his company, I have no problem. I would like to make it a policy. So, if you want to do it, cheers to that, but be open about it," Gurnani had said.

‘People were not toxic’

Such out-of-the-box thinking and policies are not new for Gurnani. After the shocking Satyam scam, where its founder admitted to falsifying accounts, Mahindra & Mahindra bought the company and brought Gurnani to run it.

Almost all the employees of the beleaguered company had turned persona non grata. However, he said, “The company’s accounting books were toxic, the people were not.”

Amidst dealing with legal and regulatory issues, he did roadshows lasting many months to convince clients to stay with the company. However, as the immediate task was to improve profitability of the company, he had to do what he dreaded — fire around 18,000 people.

The firing was not done at one go however. The company gave a small salary for six months, set up job fairs, trained them and even had psychiatrists to help tide over the crisis – until they found another job.

As with moonlighting and the Satyam restructuring, Gurnani brings his unique perspective to artificial intelligence (AI) as well. The chemical engineer from NIT Rourkela isn’t worried about AI taking over human jobs – he believes it will give humans more leeway to create emotional connections and relationships, and of course bring in more creativity to work and life.