When Lingaro Group CEO Sam Mantle visited Bengaluru last week, the city’s traffic may have overwhelmed him, but the comfort of one of its luxurious hotels provided him with a much-needed respite. We at AIM had the opportunity to catch up with him in this elegant setting, delving into his thoughts and vision for Lingaro’s future in India.
The Polish IT firm is focused on data, and data alone, as Mantle highlighted Lingaro’s unwavering focus on this core area.
The company first set foot in India a few years ago. Now, it is here again with ambitious plans to increase its revenue by 30% year over year and double its workforce to 400 employees.
A realist at heart, Mantle is pragmatic about industry trends and has strong opinions on generative AI.
“There’s been a lot of hype around generative AI, but the promise hasn’t been realised. It’s going to take a lot longer than people think,” he said. Mantle isn’t the only one with this sentiment, and there’s more to the story.
Barriers to the AI Promise
For one, Mantle mentioned that the legacy workforce is the biggest barrier to adopting a disruptive technology like AI.
“Most people have not grown up with the capabilities that are available today. So, we have to rewire the way we think and the way we’re organised,” he explained.
Moreover, Mantle also pointed out that, unlike individuals, it isn’t going to be easy for enterprises to adopt generative AI quickly, like the flip of a switch.
Despite the difficulties, companies have been actively deploying AI services and products in their workflows. In the recent Microsoft Ignite 2024 event, Microsoft said that nearly 70% of the Fortune 500 companies now use Microsoft 365 Copilot. Similarly, LangChain’s recent survey revealed that 51% of companies have already implemented AI agents in their tech stack.
India is not far behind, either. It was recently reported that over 18,000 developers at Infosys have written code using AI and that the service provider giant is fully embracing generative AI.
That said, Lingaro is a proponent of AI, and the progressive adoption of AI tools aligns seamlessly with its vision. No matter what specific AI use case a company is implementing, Lingaro says it is providing the building blocks – which is its core ethos of providing data services.
Lingaro sees a big opportunity to assist companies in adapting generative AI. Mantle said that most companies don’t have the right level of data ownership, and governance. If companies do not know what data they are using for AI algorithms, they might not be able to realise the best outcome.
Mantle believes that regardless of where companies choose to prioritise, the backend, the engine, the accelerators, and the data assets must all be orchestrated seamlessly so they can quickly gain an advantage.
This is also what products like Snowflake and Databricks are doing, albeit with a product. Mantle revealed that Lingaro isn’t just offering a product of its own but also partnering with products like Snowflake, Databricks, and other data-focused software on the market. Moreover, Lingaro has established a close relationship with ‘hyperscalers’ like Microsoft, Google, and AWS, indicating their role in a broader section of the ecosystem.
“Increasingly, the big enterprises are moving more towards hybrid environments. For example, you have to combine Azure with GCP. You have to combine GCP with AWS. Nobody wants to be all in with one—that’s beautiful for us because that’s the complexity that we need to help them navigate,” Mantle further said.
That said, their big ambitions in India, have even bigger competitors in the world of AI.
Battle With the Great Indian IT
India is a critical hub for Lingaro, as Mantel emphasised the country’s “tremendous wealth of data talent” and its reputation as a global leader in the tech services ecosystem.
With just over 2,000 successful projects, Lingaro’s portfolio is rather humble in comparison to industry giants like HCL, Infosys, or TCS. These companies are also exponentially expanding their project portfolios with time.
For example, in the Q1 2024-25 earnings call, TCS chief K Krithivasan, said, “We are currently executing about 270 AI projects across TCS. Our AI pipeline has doubled in a quarter to $1.5 billion. Our investments in research and innovation continue. In Q1, we applied for 154 patents and were granted 277 patents.”
At the FY25 Q2 earnings call, they announced that that over 600 AI and generative AI engagements have been deployed successfully.
Even HCL recently onboarded 25 new clients, owing to the success of their AI suite, ‘GenAI Force’. This suite consists of some of the best market-leading AI products, including Anthropic’s Claude and Github Copilot. So, if Lingaro has to make a mark, they have strong competition to overcome.
Lingaro differentiates itself by avoiding the ‘doing everything for everyone’ approach. Mantle said Lingaro is focusing on data specific services to their clients instead of the whole solution. “We’re only delivering data-related services, so we’re not distracted by all of the other things that are going on in the industry,” he added.
Mantle also highlighted Lingaro’s priority of understanding their clients’ technology and business needs before laying out their expertise in data. He said that their ability to combine tech and domain data understanding is what he believes sets Lingaro apart from most of the other more generic services.
Notably, we are living in a time when AI agents are poised to make it big, possibly threatening service providers. This is especially true due to the ease with which companies can build and deploy these agents. Owing to this, several companies in India’s IT sector may face difficulties.
Mantle, however, believes that deploying application layers across all parts of a company’s IT estate isn’t everything one needs to do. He believes that the onus must be on the data component present inside these applications and focus on its role.
“I’m interested in who owns the data component that may sit in that application. Because if we really want to streamline things, somebody has to be responsible for that data, no matter where it flows within the organisation,” he concluded.
The post Lingaro CEO Thinks the GenAI Enterprise Revolution is Slower Than it Looks appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
