Infosys leveraging generative AI capabilities for clients, within company, says CEO Salil Parekh

Infosys CEO & MD Salil Parekh

Infosys is leveraging generative AI capabilities for clients and within the company, Chief Executive Officer Salil Parekh said as India's second-largest IT services company announced its results on April 12.

“We have active projects with clients working with generative AI platforms to address specific areas within their business. We have trained open-source generative AI platforms on our internal software development libraries. We anticipate generative AI to provide more opportunities for work with our clients, and to enable us to improve our productivity,” Parekh said.

Generative AI is fast emerging as the new tech battleground as companies go head-to-head to bag a bigger share of the pie. The immense popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT has thrust the new technology into the spotlight.

Going big on generative AI

Parekh added that the Bengaluru-headquartered firm was working with both open-source and proprietary platforms and had trained open-source generative AI platforms on its internal software development libraries as well.

“We have active client projects today, the projects that we're working on focused on large models within the client organisation for different areas and how generative AI can take advantage of those large models, and create something that is more efficient for the client," he said.

The company was working on its own software development tool on an open-source generative AI platform— "we are actually working with two of them. We are building. We are training in our software development libraries”, Parekh said.

Generative AI would provide more opportunities for work with its clients and also enable the company to improve productivity, he added.

Infosys posted a disappointing set of numbers, with its Q4FY23 dollar revenue down 2.2 percent sequentially at $4,554 million. For the year, revenue growth in constant currency came in at 15.4 percent, below the company’s guidance of 16-16.5 percent. The company's net profit declined 7 percent to Rs 6,128 crore sequentially.

For the next year, it has guided for revenue growth of 4-7 percent.

Infy's ChatGPT connection

Infosys was one of the first backers of OpenAI under former CEO Vishal Sikka. In 2015, Parekh said Infosys supported OpenAI with a donation.

Read: India has a unique opportunity and responsibility in AI: Vishal Sikka

Last quarter, Parekh said that there were examples where the company was using ChatGPT with client situations which in turn was starting to further increase productivity and automation.

Infosys’ rival TCS, which reported its results on April 12, also said generative AI was dominating conversations with clients. Chief Operating Officer NG Subramaniam said that in interactions with clients over the last quarter, the “conversation starts and stops with ChatGPT”. TCS is also running pilots and plans to have a centre of excellence around the technology.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet has said the company has been integrating generative AI.

“When people talk about the new kinds of generative AI, which we're super excited about being like a copilot to human beings, the entire process has to be changed in order to make that work. You've got to upskill the people and you have to be able to do all of that in a very responsible way.  So we're already working with it. There's been a lot of demand to understand this,” she said. While understanding how hard it would be able to implement at scale in an enterprise, too, was a great opportunity, she said.

Generative artificial intelligence learns from past data. It can create, or generate, text, images or computer codes. Take the example of ChatGPT, it can write essays, letters, resumes, codes and even churn out recipes based on text prompts.