Unisys's Talent Crucible: Forging India's Next AI and Quantum Leaders

BENGALURU, India – December 04, 2025 – As global technology firm Unisys opens registration for its seventeenth annual Unisys Innovation Program (UIP), it’s easy to dismiss it as another corporate outreach initiative. Yet, a closer look reveals a far more strategic play. This six-month technical competition for India's engineering students is not merely about corporate social responsibility; it's a meticulously crafted engine for talent cultivation, directly addressing one of the most pressing challenges facing the technology sector today: a severe and deepening skills gap in fields like artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and advanced cybersecurity.

For business leaders and investors, the program offers a compelling case study in long-term strategic investment. In an era where talent is the ultimate competitive advantage, Unisys is not just waiting for skilled professionals to emerge from academia; it is actively shaping them.

A 17-Year Legacy of Bridging the Talent Gap

Established in 2009, the Unisys Innovation Program has become a cornerstone of India's tech education landscape. Its longevity alone is a testament to its success and relevance. Over its history, the program has attracted more than 90,000 student registrants, with its most recent edition in 2024 drawing a record 11,000 participants. This is not a small-scale hackathon; it is a sustained, large-scale initiative designed to bridge the chasm between theoretical knowledge and real-world application.

This bridge is more critical now than ever. India is facing a potential shortfall of over one million skilled AI professionals by 2027. The demand for talent in cybersecurity is equally stark, with an estimated need for 1.5 million professionals by 2026 against a significantly smaller available pool. The situation in quantum computing is even more acute, with one report highlighting that for every three quantum-related job openings, there is only one qualified candidate available.

These are not just statistics; they are alarm bells for an industry built on innovation. In this context, UIP's mission transcends a simple competition. It functions as a vital pipeline, identifying and nurturing the next generation of problem-solvers. As Lalithanand Moses, vice president and managing director of Unisys in India, noted, "The Unisys Innovation Program is more than a competition – it's a dynamic platform where emerging talent and experienced mentors come together to turn possibilities into progress."

From Theory to Application: Forging Career-Ready Innovators

What sets the Unisys program apart from many other corporate initiatives is its deep focus on experiential learning. The competition is structured into two distinct tracks: the Student Innovation Program (SIP), which encourages participants to develop their own independent ideas, and the Targeted Innovation Program (TIP), which challenges them to solve specific, industry-defined problems posed by Unisys and its clients.

This dual approach ensures that innovation is both fostered organically and directed toward pressing business needs. The impact is evident in the quality and sophistication of past winning projects. For instance, recent winners from Ramaiah Institute of Technology developed a novel methodology for making the decisions of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) more explainable—a critical step for building trust in AI for applications in medical diagnostics and autonomous vehicles. Another winning team created a comprehensive, AI-powered waste management system complete with computer vision for litter surveillance and an app to encourage community participation.

These are not classroom exercises. They are complex, market-relevant solutions that leverage a sophisticated stack of technologies, including IoT, computer vision, and large language models (LLMs). By working on such projects for months under the guidance of Unisys mentors and industry experts, students gain invaluable hands-on experience that makes them career-ready from day one. They learn to collaborate, manage projects, and communicate complex technical ideas—soft skills that are often underdeveloped in purely academic settings.

Decoding Tomorrow's Business: A Strategic Alignment

The themes for the 17th UIP read like a checklist of the most disruptive forces in technology today: 'Connected World,' 'Immersive Experiences,' 'Agents Unleashed,' and 'Innovating the Quantum Frontier.' A particularly telling theme, 'Beyond the Perimeter,' directly addresses the evolving cybersecurity landscape. This is no coincidence. These themes are a direct reflection of Unisys's own strategic priorities and core business offerings.

Unisys, a company with a 150-year history of technological evolution, has staked its future on solutions in cloud, AI, and cybersecurity. The 'Agents Unleashed' theme, focusing on agentic AI, aligns perfectly with the company's new Cloud AI solutions and its roadmap for developing systems that can anticipate and act autonomously. 'Beyond the Perimeter' points directly to the company's expertise in advanced cybersecurity, exemplified by its Unisys Stealth® micro-segmentation software, which provides granular security in a world where traditional network boundaries are dissolving.

Similarly, the focus on 'Innovating the Quantum Frontier' is a direct response to the looming threat and opportunity of quantum computing. With industry reports emphasizing the need for quantum-safe cryptography, Unisys is using its innovation program to cultivate talent that can think about and build solutions for this next great technological shift. This alignment ensures that the ideas generated within UIP are not just academically interesting but potentially viable for integration into Unisys's product and service ecosystem, creating a powerful, symbiotic relationship between the program and the company's bottom line.

By immersing students in the very challenges its R&D teams are tackling, Unisys is effectively building an external innovation engine and a future hiring pool that is already familiar with its strategic direction. It’s a forward-thinking approach that other companies would do well to study, as it demonstrates how to transform talent development from a cost center into a strategic driver of growth and innovation. As registration opens for the next cohort, it's clear that the solutions developed may not only win a student competition but could one day redefine how businesses operate.