Infosys CTO Tarafdar’s advice to engineering students: Master AI to stay ahead in the game

Infosys CTO Rafee Tarafdar and Moneycontrol's Chandra R Srikanth at Moneycontrol & CNBC-TV18 AI Alliance NCR Chapter in Gurugram

The future belongs to those who can effectively understand and make artificial intelligence (AI) work for them, Infosys chief technology officer (CTO) Rafee Tarafdar has said, as engineering students prepare to step into the professional world upended by artificial intelligence (AI).

Speaking at the Moneycontrol and CNBC-TV18 AI Alliance NCR Chapter in Gurugram, Tarafdar said a crucial distinction between two roles is emerging in the workforce: the consumers and the creators of AI.

The comments assume significance as technology companies are increasingly hiring people with niche skills. Infosys said in April it has changed its hiring model, with more than half of the freshers recruited off-campus now.

For those entering the workforce from non-software engineering backgrounds, Tarafdar advises focusing on becoming consumers of AI. "Because if they can use a lot of AI tools and become very proficient, then they can be much more productive and they can add a lot more value," he said.

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

The CTO of India’s second-largest IT services company said graduates with deep engineering backgrounds should channel their skills toward creating AI solutions. They could fine-tune models, develop new techniques, and build AI-led solutions using existing open-source or cloud-based models.

“So if they can focus on how do we create these solutions, I think then they will become a lot more relevant for the industry,” Tarafdar said, adding then the industry could find people both on the creation as well as on the consumption side, who could be “very meaningful”.

Infosys rolled out a significant number of Generative AI (Gen AI) solutions internally in the last 18 months, Tarafdar said to a query on the extent to which the company had deployed AI.

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Infosys’ learning platform is fully Gen AI-enabled. “We have created a lot of innovative learning techniques using large language models, called Socrative learning, where you reason it out and... it gives you examples to do adaptive learning,” Tarafdar said.

The company has also given a choice of different code assistance to all its developers. He said because Infosys is a global organisation, sometimes it becomes a challenge to find information such as when it worked on a particular quantum-computing project.

The company has also launched a sales assistant for most of its client-facing team members who can find information about the work that Infosys has done. “Now the entire information that we have collated over four decades is available to them at their fingertips,” he added.

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