‘India a strategic location where we grow at faster pace’

NYSE-listed digital engineering company EPAM recently opened an engineering centre in Coimbatore to expand its AI offerings.Srinivas Reddy, head of GCC business unit and MD of EPAM India, said this in part to tap the local engineering talent but also to get closer to the growing number of global capability centres. In an interview, he speaks about AI adoption and the focus on Chennai and Coimbatore as drivers of growth. Excerpts:
 What's the plan for Coimbatore?The Coimbatore unit is an advanced engineering and delivery centre spread across 67,500 sqft and currently employs over 250 people. The centre will be engaged in product and platform engineering for international clients. Are there difficulties in finding talent here?Both early-career engineers and experienced professionals work at the centre. We hire a lot of engineers straight out of college and then put them through our six-month-long training programme to turn them into AI-native developers and calibrate them to our competency framework. We started our first batch this Jan and there is a dedicated space for junior programmers to learn. Candidates go through global interview rounds and coding challenges just like other places. It is not very different from Chennai. What's the rationale behind the Coimbatore centre? We are already in Hyderabad, Pune, Bengaluru, Gurugram, Chennai. The next logical location was Coimbatore. Cost is a factor, but not key to our decision. Access to good engineering talent that can be scaled is a determinant. We have been hiring from colleges in Coimbatore for a few years now. The attrition rate will be much lower if you hire in a home city, so it made sense for us to build a facility here. Last year we scaled big in Chennai, and this year it will be Coimbatore. It will be faster than other locations, but with a lower base. We work with around 60 GCCs across locations. There are many GCCs that are either moving or planning to move into Coimbatore. So, it will help us prepare here as well.  Are GCCs in India taking more ownership? Most of our customers are Fortune 500 companies, including leading tech companies and banks. EPAM has more than 60,000 people in 50-plus locations. We provide a service to these large companies both in the market and from our delivery locations. India is a strategic location for EPAM, and we will continue to grow at a faster pace. India is no longer purely a delivery base; it is becoming an in-market location where clients and decision-makers are present. That requires local business development and eventually local sales capability beyond having engineering capacity. While most GCCs are headquartered in the US or Europe, decision-making is increasingly shifting toward Indian leadership, with budget ownership, client relationships, and strategic accountability being held locally. We are seeing a steady rise in INR-to-INR contracts year on year.  What explains EPAM's hiring push despite fears of AI-led job losses?We plan to recruit 2,000 talents across India, including 750 junior engineers. Data and data engineering have been EPAM's fastest-growing practice over the past year, both globally and in India. As companies are rushing to adopt AI and generative AI, they are quickly discovering that their data, governance and cloud adoption are not ready. Fixing that foundation has become urgent, and the investment is flowing in. It is also familiar territory for EPAM, which has historically operated in exactly this space. What's your view on AI impacting tech services companies?Pure unit-cost, body-count contracts are not something the company has historically pursued. We will become AI-native in two years. That means AI tools are already being rolled out internally in hiring, upskilling, and HR processes.  What's the status of tech spending? From India, I continue to see healthy demand. Last year was good. There was a little bit of pickup for us at the beginning of the year.