Plenty of experts have expressed concern about how AI will impact IT services companies, but Infosys seems to be looking at AI as an opportunity.
Infosys co-founder and its current non-executive Chairman has said that he’s “very confident” that Infosys will emerge stronger in the AI age. Nilekani was asked about how Infosys was planning to overcome the AI challenge, which could make coding accessible to everyone and reduce the value of its services.
“Well I think there are many times in the past when such obituaries have been written,” Nilekani said. “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, we’ll actually use it to our advantage to move forward and become even more critical to the world’s technology needs,” he added.
Nilekani conceded that IT companies would need to change how they operate in a post-AI world. “I think (all IT companies) are doing that. It will mean major things. The transformation of our people is very important — getting them ready for new technology, having many more individual contributors of a very high tech capability, and so on. But it is going to happen. If people have the learnability and the motivation and the commitment, the rest we can manage. It’s not a big deal,” he added.
Nilekani seemed confident that Infosys would be able to weather the AI storm. But some experts feel that this transformation might not be easy. Khosla Ventures’ Vinod Khosla has said that IT Software companies will “mostly disappear” in a post-AI world. He said that even those which survived would need to cut prices by 60-80 percent to remain competitive. This would likely mean slashing many jobs. Nilekani seems to be on board with this — his talk of more individual contributors could suggest that single employees will use AI to do the work that was previously being done by larger teams. TCS already seems to have already acted in this direction — it’s said it’ll cut its workforce by 12,000 in the next year, but has said that the cuts aren’t because of AI, but to “address skills” for the future. Nilekani himself has had an unusual view of AI — he’s suggested that India doesn’t need to build AI models, which has been criticized by some AI founders like Aravind Srinivas. It remains to be seen how IT companies adopt to AI, but Nandan Nilekani seems confident that Infosys at least will be able to emerge stronger in a post-AI world.