AI a ‘huge accelerant’ for DXC Technology

DXC Technology has been tapping into AI for decades, but its recent iteration is seen as a means of accelerating its work even further.

This is according to Howard Boville, executive vice president at the service provider, who said to ARN the tech has been helping it improve its projects across both the public and private sectors.

“Essentially, any undertaking is a series of processes and every industry has its established processes as to how to service markets, build products, deliver capabilities or meets the needs of its citizens,” he said.

“AI is a huge accelerant in the ability to remove the calcification and atrophy of those business processes.

“Every process, over time, starts to become calcified, starts to become too rigid to meet the changing market circumstances and that’s because of the way they’re put together. Artificial intelligence gives a degree of agility that’s not being possible prior.”

However, Boville added that DXC has been using AI for a long time in the form of neural networks and machine learning, not just large language modelling.

DXC vice president of consulting and engineering services for Asia Pacific, Japan, the Middle East and Africa (APJMEA) Richard James said the provider is also looking at building up its workforce’s skills in the hope of building accelerators.

By doing so, he said the company hopes to deliver better project outcomes with lower costs and risk, as well as enabling its managed services division to provide more resilient operations.

“More recently, we’ve been spending a lot more time with customers, understanding how they want to prioritise these investments and what type of business problems are they looking at,” James said.

“When we look at our practice model, whether it’s SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, or any of the other strategic partners, with those organisations and the large talent pools that we have, we’re investing heavily in understanding how to get the best out of that technology on the behalf of the customer, so embedding all of this as a sort of culture within our organisation is something we’re very, very focused on.”

Boville’s aspiration for the future is to see DXC’s workforce trained “with the skillsets of the future,” being AI.

“We’re putting the resources in place to assure that people very much feel like they belong in terms of the pace that we’re moving towards and they have the resources that allow them to do so.

“When you have an organisation that is built with people that know they’ve got a future, that’s an energy source in and of themselves.

“If they feel like they’re getting left behind, that can be a fearful place and that’s not what the culture that we want to have here. We want to have one where people are leaning into the future and actually driving the future.”

To drive home his point, Boville referred to the company’s young professionals program, which saw several 20-year-old consultants hired by James and DXC senior managing partner for APJMEA Kevin Jury.

“They [the consultants] were asking me about AI and I said, ‘Actually, you’re the future. You will determine how AI is used and you have the skills and the training that we provide here, but also the customer relationships to go and create whatever future that you want to create,’” he recounted.

“That wouldn’t have been the case if you’re doing cloud-based work. Moving workloads to the cloud isn’t going to determine what the future is, but the consultants that we have here can determine where the future goes.”

James agreed with Boville’s sentiments, claiming that enabling the chance for that level of development is vital.

“Giving those people career progression, giving them an understanding of how they can have a big impact, keeping them engaged; we have to invest heavily in this area,” he added.

DXC’s usage of AI can be seen within its own practice, as it used the technology as a crucial enabler for the next stage of its Career Navigator platform, which was originally designed to train and retain its skilled workforce by supporting employee career growth.