Used to take 25-30 hours on speech drafts, I now take 5 hours: Infosys founder Narayana Murthy on ChatGPT

Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy (left) and MD Ranganath, managing director of Catamaran Ventures (right).

NR Narayana Murthy, the founder of Indian IT services giant Infosys, said advances in generative artificial intelligence have allowed him to draft speeches in a fraction of the time it once took.

The industry veteran says he uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 to help prepare draft lectures, claiming the technology has cut the process to one-fifth of the previous effort.

“Earlier, I used to take about 25-30 hours to prepare a lecture, because I take these things very seriously,” Murthy told Moneycontrol. “There must be a theme, a sub-theme, they must be interrelated. At the end, there must be a strong message, all of that.”

That changed when his son, Rohan Murty, asked him to try ChatGPT. “In a matter of five hours, I could improve the draft. In other words, I improved my own productivity by as much as five times,” Murthy added.

The 78-year-old's comments are in sync with what he has been advocating in the past, i.e., AI is more of an augmentative tool rather than a replacement tool.

Read the full interview here.

He sees this not just as a personal productivity boost but as a signal of what AI can do for the broader tech industry. Murthy believes Indian IT firms can tap into Gen AI to accelerate coding, reduce errors, and improve turnaround times.

The comments were made while announcing that Catamaran, Murthy’s family investment office, has launched a scholarship at IIM-Ahmedabad, which uses a mix of equity index and fixed income investments to fund an inflation-protected scholarship for the MBA topper every year for 20 years.

Also, read: Fear that AI will take away jobs not right, very positive about IT industry: Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy

AI won’t take jobs

“The smartness is in defining the requirement well. That’s what my son told me, unless you ask the right question, you won’t get the right output,” Murthy said.

Comparing the present AI evolution to Britain’s banking sector in the 1970s, where computers were initially opposed by union strikes, he said a meeting was held between union leaders and experts to end the deadlock.

A solution was arrived at after experts explained that by using computers, work productivity will improve and employees can go home at 5 PM after finishing their work and be with their families.

Also, read: IIT-Kanpur missed out on Rs 2,000 crore worth of Infosys shares because of archaic rules

“What will happen in the future is that our programmers and analysts will become smarter and smarter in defining better and better requirements, more complex requirements. They will solve bigger problems, more complex problems,” Murthy added.

Since then, jobs have multiplied by a factor of 40 to 50 in the banking sector in the UK and in the US, he said.

Also, read: Infosys founder Narayana Murthy urges overhaul in archaic rules on donating shares to education institutions