BENGALURU/CHENNAI:Cruising his way to the quarterly financial briefing in a self-driven car, Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka set the tone for the IT gaint’s future on Friday. Artificial Intelligence and automation — two crucial technologies behind the driverless car technology — were the points Sikka stressed on during the briefing as the ‘future of the company’, internally and in the market.
On the one hand, increasing automation inside the company is already freeing up immense effort in terms of manpower. In just one quarter (April - June, 2017) automation freed up the effort of more than 3,600 people.
Just a few weeks earlier, Infosys had announced that automation had freed up effort worth 11,000 employees in FY17. All these workers, it said, are awaiting to be reskilled or reassigned. While the company has denied any massive layoffs, its employee count is lower by 1,800 during the first quarter, even as it hired around 8,500.
Even as automation is changing the way the company itself operates, combined with artificial intelligence and other new technologies, it is also the direction in which the company’s product vision is headed.
“An autonomous vehicle for me and Pravin, built right in Mysore@infosys Engg services! Who says we can’t build transformative technologies?” Sikka asked during the briefing.
Indeed with 10 percent of the company’s revenue this quarter from “new services”, this already seems to be the focus of the company.“Going forward this is an area we will emphasise,” Sikka reiterated.
Infosys’, and the Indian IT sector’s, entry into cutting edge product technology is set to be of immense value to India’s overall economy, analysts point out. The driverless cart Sikka used was indigenously made, with software designed jointly with IIT-Delhi. “Only the very best tech firms in the world are advancing in self-driven car technology. Indian tech firms have long focused on business process and other legacy software products. But the future is this and Infosys’ turn in this direction is inevitable because they want to survive,” observed an senior analyst.
However, the direction Infosys takes is not without challenge. Retraining employees is a mammoth task that remains with substantial investment flowing in. Last quarter, the company finished training 3,000 people in AI technology, of that 2,100 on Infosys’ Nia platform. “We have trained 1,40,000 people in design thinking. These are all steps that we are taking to get our employees ahead of this automation curve,” Sikka stated.
As for hiring new talent, Infosys says that its commitment to hire 10,000 local employees in the United States will not impact hiring in India. And while increasing numbers of existing employees are likely to be replaced in favour of automation, the company expects to add around 12,000 freshers, who will all be trained in digital futures, to meet new age technology requirements. These employees will be part of the organic talent pool that will drive the company’s plans for automation.