Nandan Nilekani is guiding us: Infosys CEO Salil Parekh strikes confident note on AI leadership

Infosys CEO and Managing Director Salil Parekh said the company is firmly positioned as a leader in artificial intelligence, crediting Chairman Nandan Nilekani’s guidance for driving its AI strategy.

“Infosys is in a leading position. Actually, Nandan (Nilekani) himself is helping, like guiding us into what we are doing on AI”, Parekh told Moneycontrol’s Chandra R Srikanth while speaking at the 25th anniversary of InSTEP, Infosys’ flagship global internship programme.

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Parekh added that the best place to scale up technology is Infosys and India.“Because what we do here for large companies, there's no one else who has that sort of knowledge. These are complex, large organizations, and we know how technology works there.”

The Bengaluru-headquartered information technology (IT) major has built a lot of content and capabilities around AI, Parekh further said. For example, the company has deployed 300 AI agents that are working on AI.

“Now to make AI successful, you need two big building blocks. One is data and one is cloud. On both of that, we have invested many years ago. We are the leading company on that. The world needs all that technology talent. And my view is that will continue to be the case,” said India’s second-largest IT company’s chief.

Also, read: “Obituaries have been written many times”: Nandan Nilekani confident Indian IT and Infosys will thrive in the AI era

Focus on reskilling

He further said re-skilling ensures that everybody is ready for whatever's coming next. “If you remember a few years ago, we went through a digital change. We basically did full re-skilling. Everyone became more digital focused. A similar thing is now on to AI, and we will continue with that,” Parekh added.

Also, read: The skills that won’t be replaced by AI, according to NR Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani and Salil Parekh of Infosys

This view was echoed by Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy and chairman Nandan Nilekani, who shared the same stage.

They said that it is not the latest tool that will define success, but human skills like adaptability, collaboration, and empathy.

Murthy, who has seen many waves of technology disruption, said the one trait that stays through this constant evolution is the ability to learn.

“The most important attribute for every successful professional is what I call learnability. Learnability is the ability to extract generic inferences from specific instances and use them in solving new unstructured problems… what is important is not so much the change in technology, it is the human beings, human relationships, and teamwork,” he said.