India is the global leader in IT-enabled services (ITeS) or more commonly referred to as the Business Process Management market. In FY 2021-22 Indian BPM sector earned $44 billion in revenues and directly employed 1.4 million with several multiples of that being employed indirectly. The addressable global BPM market this year is estimated at $254 billion and is estimated to grow to $336 billion by 2025.

The industry has undergone a paradigm shift over the few decades of its existence. While BPM 1.0 was all about cost-saving and labour arbitrage, in BPM 2.0 the emphasis was on operational excellence through efficiency and quality of processes. BPM 3.0 heralded the advent of deep technology and domain expertise. The new shift towards BPM 4.0 in the immediate aftermath of the receding pandemic wave, lays stress on enabling business outcomes and ensuring resilience plus agility.

To enable BPM 4.0 to become a reality where the scale of challenges is multi-fold and the skillsets required to deliver them are much more the Indian BPM industry needs to focus on training and deploying more of an Artificial Intelligence skilled workforce which means they need to be design thinking led, extremely data and digital-driven.

Sukanya Selvarajan, Innovation Head - CFO Operations at TCS, Prashant Achanta, CTO of Firstsource, and Amneet Chowdhury, who is VP and Global Head for Infrastructure Technologies at Sutherland Global Services spoke at a BusinessLine – Nasscom roundtable on the challenges and opportunities in the BPM 4.0 evolution.