Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and chairman of Infosys, shrugged off recent concerns about Indian IT’s prospects, saying the industry’s obituary has been written “many times.” He expressed strong confidence that both Infosys and the broader sector are well-positioned to do well in the AI era.
“I think there are many times in the past when such obituaries have been written. So, whenever there's a major technology shift or a major business model shift, people say that. But I'm very, very confident that in the current environment with the advent of AI, certainly at Infosys we can say that not only will we master this technology capability, but we’ll also actually use it to our advantage to again move forward and become even more critical to the world's technology needs,” he said.
Nilekani was part of a rare panel discussion with Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy and CEO & MD Salil Parekh to mark the 25th anniversary of InStep, the flagship global internship program of the software services major.
Parekh also added that he is very optimistic about where things are going.
“The best place for technology at scale is really Infosys, is really India. Because what we do here for large companies, there's no one else who has that sort of knowledge. These are complex large organisations. And we know how technology works there. Infosys is in a leading position. Actually, Nandan himself is helping, like guiding us into what we are doing on AI,” he said.
Parekh added that Infosys has 300 agents that are working on AI and has also made investments in cloud and data.
Murthy, Nilekani and Parekh also emphasised the importance of upskilling, especially the importance of learnability.
“The only constant is change. The most important attribute for every successful professional is what I call learnability. So, what is important is not so much the change in technology, it is human beings, it is human relationships, it's teamwork, all of that. But behind, at the bottom of all of this, is the idea of learnability,” Murthy said.
Nilekani brushed off concerns about keeping up with rapid shifts in technology, underlining that that human interaction, human collaboration, human relations will become even more important.
Nilekani added, “I think we talked about learnability. We talked about human skills, about collaboration, empathy, leadership, which no AI can do. And we also believe that you must do first principles thinking. I think it's an area where people will have competitive advantage over AI.”
Salil Parekh recalled, “If you remember a few years ago, we went through a digital change. We basically did full re-skilling. Everyone became more digital focused. Similar thing is now on to AI, and we will continue with that.”
Their comments come at a time when the growth of the IT industry has been moderating amid macroeconomic headwinds and the AI-led disruption.
India’s largest software services provider, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), will be letting go of 2 percent of its workforce, or roughly over 12,000 employees, over the next year, in a bid to become more agile and future-ready amid rapid disruptions in technology.
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