A perfect storm of colliding trends is raging: Nandan Nilekani

Time of India

7 hours ago

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Amid multiple global challenges and AI becoming unavoidable, Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani said that the ongoing tariff wars is pushing businesses to derisk sourcing and that the energy transition adds another layer of uncertainty. Nileknai was speaking at the 44th annual general meeting (AGM) of the company.'Look around us, there's a perfect storm of multiple colliding trends that is raging. Clearly the world is shifting from a single global market to fragmented blocks, forcing companies to make strategic choices and navigate between regions,' Nilekani said in a virtual address to the shareholders on Wednesday.He said that with bilateral and regional trade rules emerging as dominant forces, there is a clear need to accelerate supply chain diversification While regulatory variances across regions present AI implementation complexities, Nilekani said that 'Legacy system modernisation and data architecture overhauls to ensure that all the firms' data as consumable AI are becoming increasingly unavoidable. Companies need both AI foundries for innovation and AI factories for scaling.'With its focus on being an AI native company, Infosys has over 275,000 of its about 320,000 employees trained in AI at different levels of proficiency.Salil Parekh, whose reappointment as Infosys CEO and MD was approved by the shareholders until March end 2027, said the company today is working on 400 generative AI projects for its clients. 'Using AI technologies, we have generated 10 million lines of code, all done through different tools that we use within generative AI,' he said.Parekh said the company has also built 200 agents within Infosys and working on 30 agent based AI engagements being deployed across different clients.On the energy transition bringing in another layer of uncertainty, Nilekani pointed out that with the future depending on the innovation in solar, wind batteries, hydrogen and nuclear technologies, electricity will play a much larger role, requiring massive infrastructure investments in transmission lines, charging stations and transformers.'This transformation, too, will have to deal with regulatory hurdles. The price of commodities will depend on how fast these changes take place,' the Infosys chairman added, explaining how every business sector including automotive, pharma, logistics, financial services and manufacturing, is facing fundamental challenges.Nilekani assured shareholders that 'Infosys offers the stability that organisations need to survive and thrive' and that Infosys today is more relevant than ever to clients.Answering shareholders' questions, Nilekani emphasised that the current wave of global capability centres (GCCs) is not about cost arbitrage but innovation arbitrage. 'Quite a few companies are setting up research centres, AI/ML centres at GCC, and we are helping many of them in this regard. This means that GCC is no longer our competitors. They're critical clients for us on AI,' he said.Besides, the company is also actively moving to tier-2 and 3 cities to enable talent coming in from the regions. It has recently opened centers in Gandhinagar in Gujarat, Hubli in Karnataka, Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, Vizag in Andhra Pradesh and Guwahati in Assam.On multiple questions around bonus and buyback, the Infosys chairman assured that the company is committed to returning 85% of free cash flow to the shareholders over FY25-29.