Wipro Ltd. Executive Chairman Rishad Premji said 2026 will mark a decisive shift in how enterprises adopt artificial intelligence, with companies moving from pilot-stage experimentation to large‑scale implementation and productization. Speaking to NDTV Network's Rahul Kanwal on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, Premji said customers globally are poised to transition from limited pilots to fully scaling AI solutions. “2026 will be the year where customers we serve move from piloting to scaling and productise,” he said.
Premji noted that while today's large language models are powerful enough to tackle complex business use cases, they often lack the contextual depth needed for high‑quality outputs. The real work, he said, begins with building strong data foundations. “The LLMs today can solve the scale of business use cases but not have enough context. That implicitly starts with curating and organising data,” he said.
Here's where Wipro has been involved in with its clients. Premji said companies have already made significant investments in AI infrastructure, but returns will now hinge on how rapidly organisations consume and deploy these technologies in real operations. “There's a lot of investments in AI infrastructure but now consumption will drive the returns,” he said.
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Premji highlighted the growing value of specialised AI models built on top of costly foundational systems. These domain‑specific models, he suggested, will deliver the most meaningful gains for businesses. He also stressed that India has the capability to build advanced multilingual AI models, tapping into its linguistic diversity. “India can build multilingual models,” he said.
Beyond model development, Premji argued that India is well‑positioned to become a global leader in deploying AI at population scale. “India can become the engine of scale deployment of AI in the world,” he said, noting the country's digital public infrastructure and strong pool of engineering talent.
On questions related to restrictive US immigration and visa policy, Premji said Wipro continues to localise its workforce in its most important market. “We have nearly 80% local talent in the US."
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