On Tuesday, Rahul Bhatia, managing director of InterGlobe Enterprises, the parent company of IndiGo, and CP Gurnani, the former CEO of Tech Mahindra, established a joint venture to provide AI services, including generative AI, to customers in the travel, transportation, logistics, and hospitality (TTLH) sector. InterGlobe Enterprises, the parent company of IndiGo, owns the majority of the new company, Aionos, however the precise investment ratio was not made public. The news is made at a time when software companies are asserting that their artificial intelligence businesses are generating an increasing amount of money.
“We’re plagued by several issues (in the aviation industry), and we need change in how we deal with data and internal systems. It’s ironic that aircraft are at the cutting edge of technology, but what goes to get the aircraft to fly is still very archaic. Technology is the bedrock of an aviation business, and if we can make a large step change in this, the value it brings to our company is enormous. That’s why we wanted to get into this space,” Bhatia told the sources in an interview.
Gurnani, who left his position as managing director and chief executive of Tech Mahindra, the fifth-largest IT services company in India, on December 19, 2018, stated that the company is sourcing its large language models (LLMs) from companies like Microsoft and Amazon in order to use them for AI operations in the TTLH sector. The business is creating its own LLM concurrently.
“We’re talking to smaller, dedicated AI firms, as well as hyperscalers such as Amazon and Microsoft, and are also writing our own LLM by setting up a dedicated foundry service for the clients,” Gurnani said, adding that development of Aionos’ own LLMs catering to the hospitality and logistics industry is presently being done out of a development hub in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. “In the near term, we’ll expand it to Hyderabad and Chennai,” he added.
The announcement of Aionos coincides with the expansion of claims made by leading IT services companies, who generally oversee outsourcing, training, and competence building initiatives for the Indian technology sector.The largest IT company in India, Tata Consultancy Services, has $900 million in revenue from AI deals, according to CEO K Krithivasan, who made this announcement on April 12. The company anticipates that this amount will increase. Salil Parekh, CEO and MD of Infosys, stated that the business has “industry-leading capability in AI and generative AI initiatives” and that this has allowed the company to close more agreements, however he did not provide a specific number.
