By Leo Marchandon and Coralie Lamarque
(REUTERS), May 27 (Rtrs) – Capgemini on Thursday said artificial intelligence was opening access to client spending beyond traditional information technology budgets, as the French technology services group sought to ease investor concerns that the technology could disrupt its business model.
CEO Aiman Ezzat told the company’s Capital Markets Day that clients were increasingly treating artificial intelligence as a broader operating change rather than a standard IT upgrade, creating openings across business functions.
“Now the net result is a more resilient, more diversified Capgemini, one with stronger client intimacy,” Ezzat said at the event.
The comments addressed a key investor concern that artificial intelligence could reduce demand for outside technology contractors by automating coding and other services. Capgemini argued the technology was instead expanding the scope of work it could win from clients.
That broader push was also visible in the group’s sales pipeline.
“We’ve seen an explosion of our business opportunities over the last few months. And our pipeline of business opportunities already exceeds $12 billion,” Chief Technology Officer Franck Greverie said at the event.
Nate Harbacek, OpenAI’s vice president of global business, said at the event that companies were moving from “individual use and amazement to real enterprise deployment and scale,” where “entire workflows” would be “re-architected”.
Capgemini, a founding member of OpenAI’s Frontier Alliance, also said it was targeting demand for “sovereign” artificial intelligence systems built to meet local data, regulatory and hosting needs.
Ezzat said the company was working with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft on region-specific cloud and artificial intelligence offerings, as companies and governments seek more control over where critical systems run.
(Reporting by Leo Marchandon and Coralie Lamarque in Gdansk; Editing by Matt Scuffham)
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