AI Alliance NCR: AI will not eat IT's lunch, but will amplify it, says Infosys CTO Rafee Tarafdar

Tarafdar said Infosys is one of the largest worldwide users of code assistance.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will amplify the lunch of information technology (IT) companies, as automation is not new to the industry, Rafee Tarafdar, Chief Technology Officer of Infosys, on May 17.

“AI will amplify IT’s lunch… this is not the first time technology is automating something. We have seen waves of automation happen…” Tarafdar said at the Moneycontrol and CNBC-TV18 AI Alliance NCR Chapter in Gurugram.

Tarafdar said the industry has seen technology shifts from model-driven architecture to robotic process automation and now into the AI era.

“I think the key is, are you ahead of the game, are you using technology in order to drive a lot of automation and reimagining? And if you do that, it will definitely amplify,” Tarafdar said.

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He further said Infosys is one of the largest worldwide users of code assistance. CEO Salil Parekh in April said that the Bengaluru-based company has generated three million lines of codes using large language models (LLMs) in Gen AI, and has the absolute leadership position in generative AI (Gen AI).

“A lot of these 3 million lines of code actually came for a lot of new development that we were doing in five languages, which is Java, .NET, Python, Golang, and in JavaScript,” he added.

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Tarafdar also said Infosys has built its own specialised code assistance, as existing applications and technologies are not that effective. “The interesting thing today is also our code acceptance rate is close to about 60% which means if 100 lines of code are generated 60 lines are accepted by the developers.”

He further added that developers are able to drive “velocity in software engineering and production platforms.”

AI & job losses

When asked whether AI is already eating up jobs, the CTO said Infosys is largely looking at AI to move up the value chain and use it to deliver more value. “We are definitely hiring, at least for a lot of specialised roles that I do for power programmers,” he said.

Coders will become more efficient and productive and they are not going away at this point, he added.

To a question on how latest generative AI (Gen AI) technologies such as GPT-4o will impact the Business Process Outsourcing/Business Process Management (BPO/BPM) industry, Tarafdar said they will be used to augment the customer service employees.

“As this technology improves further, what we think is some of the tasks will get automated, but then they will start focusing on value creative-tasks,” he said, adding, “Slowly the shift will happen where they will start focusing on more value-creative work, rather than the regular work.”