Infosys steps up push for AI business, says Vishal Sikka

Infosys may be looking at giving more attention to AI in order to take it to the market independently

Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka says he would look at building the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) offerings as a standalone business, independent of the traditional services, to help build next generation applications for its customers.

With its artificial intelligence platform Mana, a part of the Infosys Aikido framework, the company is looking to help clients reduce costs and improve productivity through automation and free resources to build new applications that adds value to their business.

“The AI platform is not only for our own use for simplifying our work, it is also for building great next generation applications for others,” Sikka said at a Credit Suisse conference recently. “We want to do this as a standalone business in its own right, not something that is feature of our existing services.”

Experts say, while some companies take AI as a capability to all existing business verticals, Infosys may be looking at giving more attention to it, in order to take it to the market independently. “Given the shift in the industry, Sikka probably wants to give more attention to AI. Having a standalone focus allows you to take it to the market on its own,” said Dinesh Goel of consultancy firm ISG. 

Globally, information technology services firms are working on automation and use of AI to differentiate between them to help grab more business. This push is also hastened as business from traditional services are slow, as clients increasingly allocate funds to ensure their traditional applications work on devices such as smartphones.

Companies such as TCS, IBM have already developed dedicated business units, Digitate and IBM Watson, respectively. For example, AI is largely used in financial services sector in areas such as fraud prevention, compliance, customer behaviour analysis. 

“It makes sense to have such business oriented approach. But, how it is done at scale is something we need to look at. We also need to see how Infosys gets into large accounts with AI as a standalone business, because it requires a lot of outcomes, and people have not seen the capabilities of AI yet,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder and chief executive of Greyhound Research.

Last month, Infosys invested nearly Rs 14.5 crore in a Danish artificial intelligence start-up UNSILO through its Infosys Innovation Fund. UNSILO’s key clients include Science, Technology & Medical publishers currently. “Most people apply AI to the simplest kind of works like infrastructure management and so forth, which we do as well. But, by applying it to the higher end first, we can have dramatic impact on the L1, L2 support and these kind of things,” said Sikka.