Tata Consultancy Services just locked down a $1.5 billion contract to deploy AI for Porsche. The German sports car company apparently looked at its own engineering talent and decided what it really needed was to outsource artificial intelligence to Mumbai.
Let that sink in. Porsche builds the 911. They've been refining internal combustion engines for seven decades. They can squeeze 640 horsepower out of a flat-six that fits in a trunk. But when it comes to teaching computers to think, they're writing checks to India's largest IT services firm.
TCS will now spend the next several years installing enterprise AI systems that will definitely work exactly as promised and absolutely will not require seventeen additional contracts to fix. This is the same business model that brought you every other massive IT deployment that came in under budget and ahead of schedule. Which is to say none of them.
The retail traders are already pricing this into their portfolios. They saw "AI" and "$1.5 billion" in the same headline and immediately started Googling whether TCS has options. They're convinced this is the trade that finally makes them whole after losing everything on that semiconductor ETF they bought at the top because some guy on Twitter said chips were the future.
Porsche will get dashboards. So many dashboards. Dashboards that analyze other dashboards. AI-powered insights into vehicle performance data that their engineers already understood perfectly well by looking at the f*cking telemetry. But now it'll have machine learning, which means it's worth $1.5 billion.
The contract runs for multiple years, which in IT services language means "until we've billed enough to make the cancellation fee look reasonable."
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