Fulcrum Digital Continues Its India Growth, Hiring Momentum In 2023: CEO Dhana Kumarasamy

US-based Fulcrum Digital’s CEO Dhana Kumarasamy said his company remains bullish on India and continues to invest in the best engineering talent in the country despite uncertain macroeconomic environment.

“We are looking at India as one of the strategic growth regions, not just from the perspective of engineering talent or innovation hub. We sensed about 15-18 years that India was going to be key. Hence, we wanted to be a part of the growth story,” Kumarasamy told BW Businessworld.

Today, India hosts Fulcrum’s Global Delivery Center (GDC) at Pune which is responsible for an array of services including business platform engineering and implementation, digital engineering, cloud integration, consultancy and managed engineering services. As a result, Fulcrum’s Pune centre is at the heart of the company’s global operations which also includes a dedicated AI innovation hub – despite being based out of New Jersey, US.

In fact, India is responsible for 70-72 per cent of Fulcrum’s overall global workforce. This includes teams across Pune and Mumbai centres. In terms of innovation and Intellectual Property (IP), 80 per cent of Fulcrum Digital’s work is sourced out of the country as it hosts engineering teams, data scientists, full-stack engineers and developers here. These teams lead the company’s efforts for its food technology platform, SaaS platform and more.

Fulcrum’s business has traditionally been oriented towards international markets and the US. But lately, it has been expanding and India is part of the strategy, which is seeing the company move towards the Middle-East region as well.

Last year, Fulcrum Digital said it planned to scale its India Global Delivery Center by adding 450 employees. The open positions included data engineers, reliability engineers, full-stack developers, Magento developers, solution architects, business analysts and program managers. Kumarasamy shared that Fulcrum continues to hire in India.

“While we continue to train and retrain because technology keeps evolving, we also continue to hire engineers as we continue to grow. We still have a good number of open positions,” he said.

‘Excited About Leveraging AI’

According to a report by EY-iMocha, India is responsible for 16 per cent of the world's tech talent. This number is on par with what comes out of Europe (16 per cent) but behind the US (20 per cent).

The report also highlighted increasing usage of different tech tools, which was resulting in the growth of complexity in tech skills across functional areas (software engineering, IT and business application power user). Hence, roles such as software developers, IT engineer and function-specific non-technical roles have evolved into ‘Power’ software developer, ‘Power’ IT engineer and business with the application ‘Power’ user roles respectively.

Globally, 81 per cent of organisations surveyed affirm that there's low availability of ‘power user/ developer’ tech skills. Meanwhile, 14 per cent of organisations said a dearth will be observed in the next 3-5 years.

Fulcrum Digital has been in the know of such changing requirements and has been training and retraining its workforce. In fact, the company has been investing in AI since 2020, said Kumarasamy.

“We have kept an eye on AI since 2020. Fulcrum’s R&D in the space has been led by our CTO and we have had an AI innovation lab,” Kumarasamy added.

Fulcrum Digital already uses AI tooling to generate code, which assists its engineers and programmers. The company’s CEO shared that Fulcrum has been doing this for quite some time. “Leveraging AI tools is inevitable. There is no point in writing the same code which has been out there. AI can generate a lot of repetitive and simple code. And we train our people to use these tools,” Kumarasamy said.

The CEO shared that the company has also been experimenting with AI and has had exposure to OpenAI’s innovations for over two years.

He added that engineering roles will evolve and ’prompt engineering’ is already a new job role at Fulcrum.

In the last few quarters, Fulcrum has also been working with its customers to help them leverage AI-based solutions to address business problems. “In the last few quarters, we identified about 12 use cases working with our customers and created proof-of-concepts,” said the CEO.

This process manifested in Fulcrum creating a model which is now being used to develop AI-based solutions. Their food management software today leverages an AI predictable engine, which can predict food sales volume four weeks down the line.

Fulcrum Digital continues to build use cases and AI-backed solutions across its areas of expertise including insurance and finance as well.

Also Read: Zerodha Creates AI Policy, CEO Nithin Kamath Says Won’t Layoff Because Of New Tech