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Business News/ Companies / News/  Infosys’s next frontier is artificial intelligence: Vishal Sikka
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Infosys’s next frontier is artificial intelligence: Vishal Sikka

Vishal Sikka said he wants Infosys to focus on design and automation to help bolster sales growth

Vishal Sikka says the move to automation won’t hinder job growth. Photo: Hemant Mishra/MintPremium
Vishal Sikka says the move to automation won’t hinder job growth. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint

New York:Infosys Ltd’s new chief executive officer (CEO) is on the lookout to acquire talent and technology as he tries to push India’s second-largest software services company into artificial intelligence—helping customers automate jobs currently done by people.

Vishal Sikka, who took over on 1 August, said he wants Infosys to focus on design and automation to help bolster sales growth. That push may require some deals to add people and technology related to artificial intelligence and collaborative software companies, he said. Still, the majority of the transformation will be driven by retraining the company’s more than 160,000 employees over the next two years, he said.

“We are not interested in acquiring yesterday’s technology or acquiring growth," Sikka said in an interview at Bloomberg’s New York headquarters. “But we want to bring in talent, we want to bring in skills, we want to bring in technology that will accelerate our ambition."

To make this push without cutting jobs, Sikka is looking to the Industrial Revolution for inspiration. The move to automation won’t hinder job growth, he said, comparing it to technological advancements of the 19th century. Sikka plans to require training for his employees because they need to adjust to a technology world more reliant on design.

“The Industrial Revolution was supposed to take away all the jobs and the steam loom was going to make people irrelevant and the sewing machines were going to take our handiwork away—it never happens," Sikka said. “Everything about our world has become more productive as a result of technology but that has, in the grand scheme of things, nothing to do with employment."

Training workers

The Bangalore, India-based company is training 16,000 workers every year at its campus in Mysore, according to Sikka. He said Infosys aims to have 25,000 employees trained in a more design-focused manner by the end of the year.

“Right now we don’t have the skills," Sikka said. “The flip side is that the biggest advantage that Infosys has is our educational infrastructure, our training."

Still, some skills will need to be acquired, he said. While he declined to identify startups that might be fitting deal targets, he said he’s interested in companies that are bringing artificial intelligence techniques to processes like remote collaboration or manufacturing.

Sikka’s push for expansion and next technologies follows Infosys reporting quarterly sales growth last month that was the slowest in more than four years. He became the first non-founder CEO at Infosys after working for 12 years at SAP AG.

Bloomberg

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Published: 22 Oct 2014, 09:10 AM IST
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