Ericsson to elevate AI investments in India, maximise professional recruitments

Sweden based company Ericsson has announced to increase its investment in Artificial Intelligence in India, Sweden, and the US in order to enhance its services. For the upgradation in AI-related sector, the company is also hiring engineers and other professionals who will accelerate the automation efforts in India.

Peter Laurin, Head of Managed Services at Ericsson quoted in an interview with renowned media platform, "We have a lot of development happening in India and we are now betting on three centers — Silicon Valley, Sweden, and India — worldwide, what we call the global AI accelerators. It is super important for us that we increase AI investments and we are doubling down on India, Sweden, and Silicon Valley."

For AI acceleration, Ericsson has hired 150 engineers in Bengaluru by now and aims to hire more for better results.

Further, Laurin added, "India is a great hub for us. We would like to attract more talent in AI, automation and data science…we want to attract the best of the best in India. So, it will be a forward-leaning Ericsson in universities and other places to really attract the best."

With the emergence of technology, the hiring of a new squad is not the sole solution to survive. Companies need to give attention to existing staff as well. Ericsson is also putting efforts in to upgrade and upskill their existing professionals and engineers to perform efficiently.

Additionally, Peter Laurin said, "We have really good competent engineers. We are now looking at providing upskilling to them with a lot of internal training. It will be super important for us."

In a country like India, where networks are complicated and also a massive amount of data is generated on a regular basis, virtues of AI and automation are assisting Ericsson in various ways.

Peter Laurin added further, "India is probably one of the most competitive markets in the world, and extremely demanding for the operators. We want to make them successful. We have a lot of the AI sort of use cases that we are implementing in India for the first time."

However, the company aims to push India's specific innovation to the reach of the global marketplace.

Laurin said, "India is a great R&D hub for us, both in development and putting it into the field. It could have that we say that we develop in India and we deploy it in the US… It is also driven by the fact that there is more equipment out there. So, even if you have consolidation, you still have a network to manage."

Even if there is consolidation in the Indian market, the managed services business of Ericsson is flourishing. According to Peter Laurin, the company's business is accelerating at 2 to 4 percent year on year.

Also, he asserted, "The managed services area has never been more important than now, that is the key thing for us. We see that one thing is to deploy the advanced network but to manage the cost, and the complexity you need to have smart operations and that requires a lot of investment and we can do that and then we can replicate."