Innovate or perish

Infosys CEO's new year message applies to the entire IT sector

It is common for year-end surveys to focus on the many disruptive changes that have taken place in the world and India in 2016 — Brexit, Donald Trump and demonetisation — and express hope that the new year could see fewer disruptions. But there is at least one area where disruptions are likely to be more this year than in 2016. This concerns the accelerating forces of technology and digitisation sweeping the world, where to survive and prosper you have to embrace the dynamic. 

At least, that is what Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka has told his colleagues in a year-end letter. But his message is relevant not just for his organisation — it is already changing rapidly — it applies equally well to the 

whole Indian information technology (IT) sector, which should be in the throes of existential angst.

Mr Sikka’s message to his colleagues was blunt: “We will not survive if we remain in the constricted space of doing as we are told, depending solely on cost-arbitrage, and working as reactive problem-solvers.” It is a fact that a lot of the work that came to the firm and the industry in the past can already be done with artificial intelligence (AI) applications. To cope with this, Indian IT needs to harness the dual forces of automation and innovation. It must embrace automation to become more productive in the work that it now does, and with the resulting capacity, focus attention upwards towards innovation, both for employees and clients. In the process, Mr Sikka implicitly points to a fear that he considers unfounded. A life increasingly powered by AI or intelligent machines will not become more robotic by relying more on robots; the robots will free humankind from routine and provide a chance to people to think and innovate and thereby make their lives more meaningful.

He highlights three areas for action by his organisation: Automation, innovation and the overarching enabler, continuing education. In Infosys, automation has been taken forward by a knowledge-based AI platform called Mana that matches machine learning with knowledge of an organisation for it to drive automation. Innovation is taken forward by the Zero Distance framework to identify clients’ problems and solve them. In sum, he exhorts, think, innovate, create. All this is being enabled in Infosys by various learning modules. Those employees who are unable to change along these lines will lose out. Mr Sikka is obviously readying the company for highly disruptive internal change, which alone can empower it to meet the external challenge of disruptive change.

The Indian IT sector has delivered exponential growth for two decades by getting large numbers of workers with technical skills to perform routine functions at cheap rates through offshoring. Plus, on-site implementation has been enabled by exporting cheap Indian skills. This huge export market is transforming because of automation delivering routine functions and migration to the cloud, which is both more flexible and cheaper. So where does Indian IT go from here? It has to become the technology partner for global business to go digital by not just enabling digitisation but also improving processes through innovation. This is a tall order. 

The fact is that the technically qualified Indian workers do not have the necessary innovative quotient. Hence Mr Sikka’s message is a warning. But India does not know the depth of innovative capability that exists within it. The challenge for the government and the industry is to harness this talent, pay it well and create a culture in IT firms where workers receive job satisfaction by living in an innovative environment.