Channel News
GFT CEO Plans To Double U.S. Business, Leverage ChatGPT
Mark Haranas
GFT’s new Americas CEO talked to CRN about his plans to double its U.S. business, his company’s AWS partnership and how GFT could potentially leverage AI chatbot ChatGPT.
Marco Santos has huge plans in store for leading GFT’s newly consolidated Americas business, including a massive sales push and customer charge in the U.S.
“We have this exponential mindset to push the U.S. business and company to the limits in order to create another doubling of growth over the course of two or three years. And then another doubling of growth in two or three years after that,” said Santos, who was recently appointed GFT’s new CEO of the Americas.
GFT is a 10,000-plus employee strong global systems integrator and consultant powerhouse looking to take its U.S. business to the next level under Santos’ leadership following the combination of GFT’s operations in the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica and Mexico to form its new Americas regions.
[Related: Cloud Market Share Q4 2022: Microsoft Gains On AWS As Google Grows]
GFT’s U.S. And AI Push By Santos
GFT combined all of its Americas operations last month after its U.S. business grew over 50 percent year over year in third quarter 2022. The Germany-based digital transformation specialist is a large global AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, LemonEdge and Thought Machine partner.
Santos has been a top executive at GFT since 2011, responsible for breaking the company into the Brazilian market and growing its team from zero employees to 1,800 professionals. He was CEO of GFT’s U.S.A and Latin America regions from 2020 until January 2023, when the company officially launched its new Americas region.
“In 2022, we more than doubled the U.S. teams’ headcount in one year. We added hundreds of people,” Santos told CRN. “We doubled the business in two years, but I doubled the headcount in one year.”
One area Santos specializes in is artificial intelligence. Specifically, he plans to leverage OpenAI’s highly popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, to make his team more productive and effective.
“Using something like ChatGPT we could increase the productivity and effectiveness of our 10,000 employees globally or my 5,000 employees in the Americas by using ChatGPT to generate software, generate code, generate basic codes,” Santos said. “I’m not talking about delivering, obviously, a perfect software to the client. But we could deploy ChatGPT and other generative AI in order to bring templates, to bring software codes to make our employees much more productive. It could help them deliver more with what they have.”
In an interview with CRN, Santos explains his vision for GFT’s new Americas business, the company’s strategic partnership with AWS, and leveraging ChatGPT.
