No AI is going to replace people: Kyndryl India President
Lingraju Sawkar on the IT services company’s commitment of $2.25 billion for its India operations to focus on AI innovation, skilling and training
Last Updated: Nov 24, 2025, 11:39 IST7 min
Prefer us on Google
Advertisement
Since its spin-off from IBM in 2021, IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl has reinvented itself strategically. The NYSE-listed entity with significant India operations has improved its overall profitability, with a conscious effort at exiting low-margin contracts. The company has managed to break free of legacy infrastructure, adding automation and AI (artificial intelligence) to improve efficiency.
Kyndryl has moved from being a managed IT services company to diversifying to platform engineering, AI, application services, and a provider of business modernisation services, moving from a product IP company to a services-focussed entity.
A provider of mission-critical enterprise technology services, Kyndryl has seen its core business areas, including Kyndryl Consult and Hyperscaler integration services with public cloud providers, drive revenues. The company has also seen growth with its AI-powered open integration digital business platform Kyndryl Bridge.
In Q1FY26, Kyndryl reported a flat revenue of $3.74 billion, with improved profitability and Ebitda reaching $647 million.
In August, the company announced its plans to invest $2.25 billion in India towards developing an AI lab and future-ready talent in the country. Lingraju Sawkar, president at Kyndryl India, speaks with Forbes India about how the company is deploying AI for business and for its internal functions to scale the next phase of growth. Edited excerpts:
Q. Can you tell us more about the $2.25 billion investment in India and what portion of it is earmarked for AI-focussed initiatives?
From the investment, there are a few key elements centred around AI. One, we are opening an AI innovation lab in Bengaluru, second, opening Kyndryl centres in tier 2 and 3 cities, and the third is the area of skilling and development for reskilling Kyndryl talent as well as the community programme. Apart from this, the investment will also focus on government partnerships and solutions, and infrastructure build-up.
At a broad level, the AI innovation lab will help existing customers accelerate their AI journey. Apart from this, the second frame is on developing new models which would include co-creation by participating academics, students as well as practising domain experts.
Part of the investment will also fund the expansion of Kyndryl centres to tier 2 and 3 cities to leverage distributed talent and reduce urban congestion, enabling work to go where talent exists.
Among our government collaborations, we have recently worked on developing a platform for easing disbursal of farm loans with a bank. All banks have a mandate to lend to farmers, but the process takes 11 to 12 weeks to verify documents which fall under different departments such as land records, soil and metrology. The typical cropping cycle is 90 days and a farmer spending 60 days chasing a loan does not work well. Kyndryl has developed a platform where the records can be verified, and an in-principle approval given in 12 minutes.
Apart from this, we are looking at not only reskilling employees at Kyndryl, but also skilling people in AI through our community programmes. This is how, broadly, the $2.25 billion will be deployed over the next three years.
Also Read: We’re not chasing the AI hype: Zoho CEO Mani Vembu
Q. How has Kyndryl adopted AI internally for automation and increasing efficiencies? How has that impacted the workforce?
When we started our journey as an independent company, we focussed on advance delivery as a starting point, using technology to move the performance up. We also realised that as technology comes in, it will free up time for people, allowing them to upskill themselves to a higher level of work. In the first cycle, 13,000 delivery professionals were released from the work they were doing, and they were able to build skills for newer areas of work globally. This generated annualised savings of $775 million ahead of Kyndryl’s $750 million fiscal 2025 year-end goal.
As we speak, 33,000 certifications have been done in newer areas.
The second element is when we got spun out from IBM, we had a bunch of legacy infrastructure systems… and for modernisation, we brought in a lot of automation and AI into it. We went from 1,800 applications to 360, we went from 70 to 80 data centres to zero, and moved from 435 business platforms to one for employees. This made us say that if we are going to simplify and modernise, then it has to be built on AI.
Our employees are enabled with AI and a lot of them engage with AI for conversation and issues. If they are a part of sales, they use Copilot (by Microsoft) for customer conversation fine-tuning, customer acquisition and retention. The delivery people use agentic GenAI and Copilot. From all of this an underlying theme that has come out is the need to continually skill. There are clearly defined courses and content that we ask our employees to learn based on the skills and roles. Our programme on AI is built on what we call AIR—anticipate, integrate and reskill.
Some people are looking at AI as a way to replace people, but we say no AI is going to replace people and there will always be humans in the loop. We do not see AI as a means for employee reduction.
So, we are bringing a lot of talent who are either AI-native, which includes fresh graduate hires, who have an easier adoption of technology. That is how we see technology coming in—to excel in our business and to take our people forward.
Q. How has Kyndryl adopted AI for business outcomes?
When we started off our journey as an independent firm, it was clear we had to bring in technology as a key differentiator and make that as a value driver. So, we started our journey with the deployment of Kyndryl Bridge—our open standards AI-powered digital business platform through which we deliver services to our customers. It provides unified observability into an environment. It feeds into information that comes in and makes the environment using AI more predictive, proactive and preventive so that it prevents outages. It also enables our employees working in that environment to go up the value chain. So that’s where our external frame came in.
Kyndryl Bridge, which has enabled AI for 1,200-plus customers globally, has led to nearly $3 billion in annual savings.
Along with that, we’re working with various clients in areas of adoption of agentic AI and so on. One such example is for one of the large government ministries where we manage the tax networks. We have deployed agentic AI to enable the troubleshooting and detection of problems well ahead of time so that the downtimes are reduced.
Another example of deployment is for a large university. The problem definition is simple—they’ve got 10,000 students joining a course with five elective subjects that they have to choose… and for the final exams, each of those five subjects has four essay-type answers to be evaluated. When you look at 10,000 students, five courses, four questions, it’s almost like 200,000 answers to be evaluated. So, the problem was would you have a battery of teachers coming in to evaluate and how do you bring uniform standards in? So, we built in technology using GenAI into it where we’re fine-tuning the model. Today the model is able to evaluate every answer to a specific question exactly the way a teacher would have done it.
We have also deployed a technology called DeepThink, which is built into the Kyndryl Bridge AI platform that enables our people to troubleshoot and get to the problem faster and helps in faster resolution of the problem, reducing downtime for our customers.
Q. Can you tell us more about the AI skills training for professionals at Kyndryl and training ahead of hiring in India?
We are a four-year-old company, and the first two years were spent setting up. We started the journey of training professional hires in our second year.
We have taken two approaches to it. The first is we are working with many colleges and universities under our university skill programme where students in their final year of internship at partner universities have access to the same skills that they would have otherwise got in Kyndryl when they join. We are able to train them and we’re able to take some talent back to Kyndryl.
The second is for the batches that have already come on board. We are training the new hires on foundational skills on agentic AI and data sciences. Another area we focus on is cybersecurity and cloud operations.
The third is what I call a digital workplace and network edge.
On the other side, where we hire for software engineering, we focus on platform management/platform engineering as a play. We do this with universities and new hires.
First Published: Nov 24, 2025, 11:48
Subscribe Now(This story appears in the Nov 28, 2025 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, Click here.)
- Home /
- Leadership /
- No-ai-is-going-to-replace-people-kyndryl-india-president
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement