Virtusa seeks its mojo in the crowded GenAI market with Helio

Virtusa Helio shows promise with its comprehensive AI capabilities to enhance enterprises’ productivity and predictive and prescriptive capabilities. Virtusa has experienced early success with Helio in improving its clients’ operational efficiency and positively impacting the top line. Helio’s structured approach, workforce upskilling initiatives, and strategic cloud partnerships are strengths. If Virtusa continues along its current path, Helio could become a challenger in the crowded GenAI services space.

GenAI-enabled services are a fiercely competitive space. To continue its momentum, Virtusa will have to make further strides. These should include developing a robust compliance tool to adhere to global regulations, targeting non-core industry segments such as retail and CPG, and widening its partnership network to work with academic institutions and industry consortiums.

Helio is Virtusa’s all-encompassing GenAI bet

Virtusa Helio is an umbrella brand for the company’s past and present GenAI work and capabilities. Key elements include a Center of Excellence (CoE), a suite of AI solutions, and numerous use cases and case studies demonstrating real-world applications.

• Center of Excellence (CoE) is the heart of innovation: Helio’s CoE comprises 50 core members focused on R&D and 400 resources who are either billing or ready to bill as solution experts for GenAI projects. This structured environment is crucial for developing, testing, and deploying AI solutions to ensure robust AI model development and implementation.
• AI solutions—a suite of smart tools: Helio encompasses more than 75 AI solutions tailored to specific industry needs, with 10 solutions already in production. These solutions address key business challenges such as customer service automation, predictive maintenance, and intelligent document processing. They showcase Helio’s versatility and potential to drive significant business value across multiple sectors.
• Promising early client work: Virtusa has documented more than 75 use cases and case studies highlighting the practical applications of Helio. Key industries where Virtusa has found early success with Helio include:
  • Finance: Virtusa implemented AI-driven compliance and risk management solutions for a large global bank, which resulted in more efficient regulatory reporting and enhanced risk assessment.
  • Healthcare: For a Fortune 50 healthcare company, Virtusa delivered pre-call, in-call, and post-call assistance for member advocates, automated appeals processing for denied claims, and automation for provider call centers.
  • Insurance: For a leading American insurance company, Virtusa optimized claims management using automated damage assessment, case summaries, and resolution assistance. Helio improved sales efficiency with automated pre-meeting agent packages.

Further initiatives are underway to help Helio stand out from the GenAI crowd

Virtusa is taking several strategic steps to establish itself as a leading GenAI provider.

1. Doubling down on tech through strategic investments: The company is integrating large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, BERT, and multimodal models that combine text and image processing to enhance Helio’s offerings. For instance, to optimize cost, Virtusa uses multiple LLMs—GPT4 for generating cipher queries against a knowledge graph and LLAMA 3 as a generator. Additionally, Virtusa has developed a PreEye solution for the world’s largest advertising firm that inspects images using vision models. The company also leverages multimodal capabilities in various solutions, such as validating damage assessment by reviewing vehicle accident images and inspector notes. Moreover, Virtusa is exploring explainability techniques such as perturbation-based input feature attributions.
2. Assembling the right talent to build an AI dream team: Virtusa is investing significantly in training programs for leaders, architects, and engineers. More than 800 leaders, 200 architects, and 2,200 engineers have been trained to date on advanced AI models. The training curriculum strongly emphasizes content processing and natural language processing (NLP).
3. Strengthening partnerships with cloud providers and honing GenAI capabilities: Virtusa is enhancing its partnerships with the three major hyperscalers—AWS, Azure, and GCP. It’s piloting new GenAI capabilities with its clients, such as Vertex AI’s grounding updates and Gemini 1.5 Pro’s video capabilities. Virtusa also engaged Hugging Face to provide workshop-based training for its data scientists on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) approaches.

Focusing on compliance, hot industry segments, and new partners is key

In a market flooded with GenAI offerings, differentiation is vital. Virtusa should add the following to its strategic Helio plan for the next 24 months:

1. Lead with integrity and responsible AI.
   1. Governance frameworks: Develop a rigorous AI governance platform encompassing data privacy, security, and ethical considerations. Implement continuous monitoring and auditing of AI systems to ensure compliance with global regulations.
   2. Transparency initiatives: Prioritize research in explainable AI (XAI) and AI ethics to address growing concerns around transparency and fairness in AI decision-making. Promote transparency by developing and deploying explainable AI tools that help stakeholders understand how AI models make decisions.
2. Make further inroads into its emerging industry clientele. Virtusa showcased some impressive drone-led computer vision work for defect detection in warehouses. Currently, retail and CPG remain emerging industry segments for Virtusa. These are some of the hottest segments for GenAI adoption, providing an excellent opportunity for Virtusa to deliver business value. In the consumer goods industry, a lot of work is happening in supply chain demand planning, risk management, and quality yield optimization. Similarly, there’s a lot of demand from retailers to integrate GenAI in contact centers for provisioning digital agents to help them move from ‘product-based’ search to ‘intent-based’ search, optimize fulfillment through real-time route optimization, and aid store associates in providing better client service.
3. Cast the partnership net far and wide.
   1. Research institutions: Collaborate with leading AI research institutions, including MIT, Stanford, and the University of Toronto, to stay at the forefront of AI innovation. Also, consider hiring some leading professors as strategic advisors.
   2. Industry consortia: Join top industry groups, such as the Partnership on AI and the AI Ethics Consortium, to contribute to and benefit from collective advancements in AI standards and best practices.

The Bottom Line: Enterprise leaders should monitor Virtusa’s progress and consider how to integrate Helio’s evolving capabilities into their digital transformation strategies.

Helio’s ability to deliver concrete business outcomes through its solutions and use cases positions it as an asset for enterprises seeking to leverage AI. However, to truly stand out in the crowded GenAI market, Virtusa must invest in continuous innovation, new strategic partnerships, compliance, and targeting new industry segments.