'Into the next phase of AI maturity'

Jo Debecker, head of Wipro's FullStride Cloud business line, oversees the company's global cloud strategy. A firm believer in value-driven cloud spending for innovation, he says that the opportunity afforded by AI is clear for all to see - it has the potential to turbo-charge the enterprise cloud platform and empower organizations to innovate and stay competitive.

- Jo Debecker, managing partner & global head, Wipro Fullstride Cloud

In this interview, Debecker speaks to Sudhir Chowdhary on key trends in the AI and cloud space, and their need for greater integration to create seamless workflows. Excerpts:

How is AI accelerating the demand for cloud solutions?

Cloud implementations are accelerating at a fast pace, sometimes even faster than AI implementations. This is because the need for AI adoption is now one of the driving factors for people moving towards the cloud. To facilitate AI implementation, enterprises need the cloud. So, we can say that there is no AI without clouds.

Our latest Cloud Pulse survey shows that over half (54%) of service organizations cite AI as their main driver for cloud investment. Around 55% say that cloud adoption is currently outpacing AI adoption, and 35% are advancing both technologies in tandem. Organizations that have advanced in their cloud journey will have a stronger data strategy, which in turn unlocks the data, which in turn unlocks AI deployments.

How can enterprises adopt AI solutions effectively?

Companies need a comprehensive data strategy to capture, structure and organize data effectively. They need to ask themselves where (and how) the data is stored and how it can be captured. With large amounts of high-quality data, they can build a strong digital core to classify and organize this data. Cloud is the underlying technology - the platform on which you can build a digital core.