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Despite warnings of revenue deflation, chairman predicts AI will make more work, not less, for services orgs

Infosys chairman Nandan M. Nilekani has predicted AI – even AI that does the kind of coding work his company does for many clients – will be good for services companies.

Nilekani made his prediction in a speech delivered at the Indian services giant’s annual general meeting on Tuesday.

“The industry is going through a major technology transition and whenever there is such a transition, questions are asked about our relevance, leadership or ability to maintain growth and margins,” he said. “Given that AI is a much larger and disruptive technology transition than ever before, the questions are louder and the doubts are more insistent. Moreover, the existential question that is asked of us is, if coding becomes automated, then why are we needed at all?”

Nilekani said Infosys “will embrace the best coding tools and improve our productivity” – and also pointed out that there’s more to writing software than just writing software.

“Enterprise context is paramount,” he said. “Solutions must complement existing investments. They demand rigorous testing, resilient architecture, and foundational cybersecurity.”

The chair thinks AI can’t do that, but Infosys can.

He also thinks AI will create more demand for services that only humans can handle.

“The AI revolution has made legacy modernization urgent in a way nothing else has, and clients are moving to retire the technical debt accumulated over decades,” he said, presumably referring to the idea that AI coding tools make it possible to rewrite old code more quickly and efficiently than humans can do the job.

Nilekani thinks that organizations using AI to modernize software will prefer to build custom replacements instead of buying packaged programs.

“All this creates even larger opportunities for us,” he said. “The defining opportunity lies in integrating intelligent AI systems with mission-critical enterprise platforms. The greatest value will come from combining the world of models and agents with traditional transaction systems that continue to underpin enterprise operations. That convergence is where the next wave of opportunities will emerge.”

Infosys, naturally, has done the work needed to make itself an ideal provider of the necessary services.

“More than three years after GenAI’s launch, Infosys is more relevant than ever and well-positioned for the decade ahead,” the chairman said.

And of course he would say that – although he made no mention of “AI deflation”, the decline in services revenue that Infosys and India’s other tech services giants recently said is likely because AI coding tools mean there’s less work for them to do. ®