“We would like to be a $5 billion company in the next five years,” Nitesh Banga, President and CEO, Virtusa

It’s been three months since you came on board Virtusa. What’s been your observations in the company?

We have three very strong pillars in our foundation. The first is our core and deep engineering heritage and high quality engineering talent. We are delivering strong, mission critical, complex products, platforms, programs, services for our clients. This huge capability is across the globe, whether in the US, which is our largest market, or in India, which is our largest delivery centre. The second is the strong domain knowledge in verticals like BFSI, life sciences, healthcare, communications and technology. The third is we do not have thousands of clients but strong marquee logos who have been with us for 15, 20 and 25 years, 15 years, 20 years.

A few years back, it was employees first; then it was customer first and now it is AI first.  How are you looking at this transformation?

Till 6 to 12 months back, everybody was still wondering whether AI is the next cloud or AI is the next blockchain. I am a firm believer that AI is here to stay and will evolve enterprises to the next level. I am not so worried about job losses and other things. I think it’s more about evolution, not revolution. AI will help increase productivity and people’s lives and jobs will become much more upscale. I’m a strong believer that organisations will need to adopt an AI centric AI first approach.

How have you upskilled your 30,000 plus employees on AI?

Over the last year, each of our employees have been taken through basic AI and product engineering training. And almost 1,000 of our employees are now deeply embedded into understanding and learning how to codify these agentic experiences. Technology is changing so fast. Our platform, Helios, embeds multiple technologies in it. We are trying to do a combination with our innovation labs and training academy to upskill and evolve our own employees’ capability. And this we are doing both at the entry level as well as for our senior employees.

You have around half of your employees in India. How do you plan to scale?

We will continue to grow in India because it is our largest service centre. We are also having tie-ups with 100 COEs with universities. We will continue to work on our campus recruitment. We will continue to double down in India.

How is your attrition level?

Our attrition level is pretty much under control and four or five points below the industry standard. Many of our employees are working on interesting next-generation product and platform engineering-based projects. We have been able to do a good job in retaining our employees not only by good work but also by offering competitive packages, compensations and the career growth project.

You are a $2 billion company now. When will you reach $5 billion?

We would like to be a $5 billion company in the next five years.