It ain’t Artificial Intelligence: In demand, tech CXOs write own cheques

NEW DELHI: Barun Gorain joined Hindustan Zinc Ltd as chief technology and innovation officer two months ago, moving from Barrick Gold in Canada, one of the many CXO-level hires that Indian companies have been making in the buzzing areas of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, the Internet of things (IoT) and robotic process automation (RPA).

Other recent instances of Indians returning home with domain knowledge in these emerging technologies include Raghuram Velega, who left his job at a San Francisco-based cognitive computing company to join Reliance Jio Infocomm as vice-president, head, big data and analytics. Former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) executive Santanu Bhattacharya joined Bharti Airtel as chief data scientist and Ayush Sharma moved from Silicon Valley to join Reliance Jio as senior vicepresident of engineering and technology.

Search firms like Korn Ferry, EMA Partners, Transearch and Hunt Partners say there’s a paucity of experts in these fields, leading to a jump in salaries of new hires by as much as 50%, most of them from overseas.

Salaries for such executives are at Rs 1-2 crore annually but can be even higher.

“They pretty much write their own cheques,” said Monica Agrawal, senor client partner, global financial markets, Korn Ferry (India). There are at least 30 ongoing searches for people with such domain expertise by search firms, including the ones cited above.

War for Talent Looms
“The average age of CXOs hired for emerging technologies is about 35 to 40 years compared with average age of 45 years of CXOs for other domains,” said Agrawal.

Mahindra & Mahindra, Uber, Deloitte, Infosys and others confirm that such people are being hired, raising the prospect of a war for talent down the road.

“We are looking out for this kind of talent but the pool is limited,” said Richard Lobo, head of human resources at Infosys.

M&M is actively seeking talent with such expertise. “We will be using AI and emerging technologies across the Mahindra Group and we are taking it very seriously,” said Prince Augustin, executive vice-president, M&M. “This field is very new and fast changing, so it is difficult to find veterans in this space and hence naturally there is a lot of demand, with a scarcity in the supply side.”

The group has recently made hires in AI, IoT and other emerging technologies.

As these and other automated technology solutions are new, there aren’t many domain experts with more than 15 years of experience, especially for leadership roles, said Uday Chawla, managing partner, Transearch. Most senior leaders are coming from the US market.

“The talent from developed markets has a competitive edge, having got started a good few years back,” said Suresh Raina, partner at Hunt Partners. In addition, the India startup scene, sustained private equity and venture capital investments, US protectionism and anti-immigrant sentiment are some of the other factors helping draw talent to India.

Despite challenges at the supply end, companies continue to be bullish on building tech teams with a focus on AI. “We would continue hiring talent for AI in bots at senior manager level. We are in particular looking at people who have experience in the US and Europe,” said SV Nathan, chief talent officer at Deloitte India.

Rising Demand
Korn Ferry, in the past year, has got half a dozen search mandates from clients for such domain experts compared with almost none the year before. EMA Partners has witnessed a 150% jump in searches in this space for CXOs. It is currently working on seven such leadership searches. Head Hunters India is currently working on eight CXO-level positions with expertise in AI, big data, etc.

Transearch India has four searches on for talent in the domains. ABC, which currently has more than 25 mandates for senior AI experts, sees demand rising in the next year or so.

“Though IT sector has been hiring AI specialists at junior level, the leadership hiring in this space to decide on AI, digital strategy for the organisation has picked up of late,” said A Ramachandran, senior partner at EMA Partners.

Talent isn’t restricted solely to overseas sources. Nitin Sareen recently joined as senior vice-president at Aditya Birla Management from an analytics firm and Deep Thomas moved to the Aditya Birla Group as group chief data and analytics officer from Tata Insights & Quants.

In the past four years, Uber has been actively hiring such talent at its Bengaluru and Hyderabad locations.

“We would continue to look out for more such talent as we expand these engineering centres,” said Vishpala Reddy, chief people officer, India and South Asia.