Information technology company Infosys has not seen any change in the discretionary spending from the levels seen in January-March quarter.
"One of the comments we made during the earnings time which holds... generally the discretionary spends approach looks similar at the end of Q4 and start of Q1... and the same thing is visible to us today," Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Infosys, Salil Parekh told CNBC-TV18's Shereen Bhan in an exclusive interaction.
He added that the economic environment has been slowing and as a result, most digital transformation projects have slowed down. "Most of what we are seeing today are in terms of large programmes are cost, efficiency, automation, and consolidation of partners," Parekh further said.
Despite the challenges, India’s second-largest IT company is confident of meeting its constant currency revenue guidance for FY25, which stands at 1-3 percent.
On the revenue guidance front, Parekh said it will relook at the guidance at the end of each quarter. "What gives us comfort... one is the large deals... second is that the discretionary spend has remained about the same which has not become worse... and then on financial services that we saw a small better movement, and finally Gen AI where we have completely transformed from the company," Parekh said.
The Bengaluru-based company also said it is working on 200 generative AI (Gen AI) projects, and as many as six out of eight Infosys employees are getting trained in different aspects of generative AI.
The CEO also said the company is actively training six out of every eight employees in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Gen AI across various levels, to seize the substantial opportunities presented by this nascent technology.
The company has developed a “very specific way” to cater to large clientele for captive use of Gen AI. Parekh said for Gen AI to work well within a large organisation, data is the key along with cloud adoption.
“We are now through our digital move over the last few very strong on both cloud and data and that’s helping us as we connect with our clients,” Parekh said.
When asked about the potential threat of job losses due to AI, Infosys said it is opening up newer areas where the technology can be deployed. He said it has helped in productivity, time-to-market, and cheap cost.
“At this stage, given it’s a small size within our business we don’t see a big change,” Parekh said. “We see hiring come back as the economic environment improves and spending on digital transformation picks up.”
A couple of quarters ago, Infosys was more on proof-of-concept, whereas now it is working on actual projects with clients.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning is something that we have been using for a very long time, what we are referring to is new change… is the manufacturing of intelligence, if there are discussions on metrics… we want to be clear as and when we share them it’s more focussed on Gen AI,” Parekh said when asked to disclose the revenue it has generated though AI and Gen AI projects.
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