As one of India’s largest technology services providers, Infosys is at the forefront of technology innovation and is leading the way for multiple AI and analytics solutions for its customers across the globe.

In an exclusive interaction with AIM, Balakrishna D R, EVP – service offering head for energy, utilities, communications services and AI and automation services at Infosys, shared details of select projects in AI and analytics, alongside sharing in-house initiatives, future of work, scaling AI investments and more.

At Infosys, Balakrishna heads the AI and automation unit. He has been with Infosys for over two decades, heading sales, program management, and delivery roles across geographies and industry verticals. 

Balakrishna said that the company has over 1,000 ready-use cases across industries, projects, technologies, and service lines in AI/ML. He believes that the biggest challenge enterprises face today is not the lack of technology but identifying the right use cases and delivering significant value. 

“You need to understand your business, identify where AI can create the maximum impact, and then make sure you can handle all aspects to bring that use-case to life,” said Balakrishna. 

AI and analytics use cases 

Infosys is redefining the tennis experience for fans and players using data analytics, AI/Ml, and AR/VR. The company generated metrics using data like spin, speed, placement, and position, which provided insights to improve decision-making. 

In addition to this, Infosys provided an immersive experience through 3D Court Vision and 3D Art Museum of key events and digital exhibitions associated with Tennis. It also provided instant access to key moments in a match, including crowd sentiment, statistical data, and other ML-powered insights, which can be useful for journalists. 

Infosys’ AI-powered voice assistants brought a global audience close to the Roland-Garros through popular smart home devices, such as Amazon Alexa, serving information to live radio broadcasts and event podcasts. 

Besides this, Infosys’ autonomous system platform is driving India’s first-ever project on autonomous buggies—a commercially viable solution for controlled environments. This technology helps in auto-braking and provides navigation features equipped with advanced LiDAR and vision technologies with AI and a deep learning engine to detect objects, lanes, and curves for navigation. This buggy is used in industrial areas, education campuses, airport environments, and amusement parks. 

In energy-as-a-service, Infosys and the integrated energy company, bp recently announced a partnership where they co-developed a digital platform that collects data from multiple energy sources and uses AI to optimise the supply and demand for heat, power, cooling, and electric vehicle charging. 

Infosys said that, here, the key outcome was to provide 100 per cent clean, cost-effective, optimum, and reliable energy (electricity and green fuel) with access to monitor and manage the consumption pattern while creating smart and energy-efficient infrastructure. 

In addition, Infosys is looking to amplify data and AI with the cloud. “More companies, including our own team, are now seeing the benefits of cloud when it comes to catalysing digital transformation—because of its ability to increase development and processing speed while providing near-limitless scale,” said Balakrishna. He said the Finnish Postal service, ‘Posti Group’ is one of the oldest companies in Finland and presents an inspiring instance. 

In collaboration with Infosys, Posti replaced its legacy systems and processes while incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning—moving to the cloud to amplify their full-scale digital transformation. One of the outcomes was to retain happier employees through gamification. 

AI and analytics as a service 

At Infosys, AI and automation are vital deliverables that they offer, including development, maintenance, testing, migration, modernisation, implementation, rollout and more, across all projects, technologies, and service lines. This leads to scaling enterprise, productivity improvement, customer satisfaction, amplification of the capabilities of people to take faster decisions, and new avenues of business. 

For example, in application support, Infosys leverages LEAP (the live enterprise application platform), Infosys Cognitive Automation Studio, Infosys Intelligent Assistant, and Polycloud to analyse the data, predict failures, and take proactive actions to prevent incidents. The company’s automation solutions include self-healing and self-service with zero-touch automation. Its Cortex platform is being used to reimagine the contact centre operation significantly. 

Infosys follows the principles of DevSecOps and distributes agile to deliver faster time to market and ensure seamless collaboration between RUN and Project organisation. “We have developed the Infosys DevOps platform (IDP), and many of our clients have adopted this,” said Balakrishna. 

For application development, Infosys uses multiple low code/no code platforms like Mendix, Deep Code, Power Apps, Appian, and others. “We have also created Infosys Digital Foundry that can create apps, set up the CI/CD pipeline, and deploy and host the solution quickly,” added Balakrishna. 

For migration projects, Infosys leverages its automation platforms like Infosys Modernization Suite. This leverages neural machine translation for database migration. The team has been using this for multiple migration programs. “Our model is getting better with every implementation,” said Balakrishna. 

In terms of testing, Balakrishna said that they have reimagined their entire testing services with Infosys Test Automation Framework, Infosys Test Data Management Suite, and Infosys Data Testing Workbench. “We are also leveraging an AI-based platform ‘Pandit’ for testing quality assurance,” he added. 

AI strategies 

Balakrishna told AIM that Infosys applied AI is a comprehensive strategy for end-to-end customer requirements of an enterprise. He said that it takes care of the roadmap to scaling enterprise-grade AI for their intelligent automation. It converges the power of AI, automation, analytics, DevOps, and cloud to deliver new solutions and perceptive experience. 

In addition, Infosys ensures that AI and automation are embedded into every fabric of their services like cloud and infrastructure management, development, maintenance, testing, migration, modernisation, implementation, rollout, and more across all project types, technologies, and service lines. 

“Our strategy is to achieve this within our customers’ existing landscape using the tools that customers already have and introduce new tools only when required,” said Balakrishna. 

He said that their Infosys Center for Emerging Technology Solutions (ICETS) and central research and development teams contribute significantly toward intelligent automation. ICETS is their incubation centre with resources working on emerging technology and building solutions relevant to client needs. The team undertakes a structured approach of experimenting with the technology and creating POCs and solutions using such emerging technology. 

Infosys’ central research and development team focuses on technologies like cloud, low code/codeless development/workflow, DevOps, event streaming, intelligent document processing, and task/process mining. It creates solutions wherein its developers work only on core business logic that requires human cognition; everything else should be templatised, standardised and automated, bringing productivity improvement. 

“Our approach to automation is multi-dimensional, covering DevSecOps—build, test and release automation through CI, CT, and CD, automation in application maintenance for handling job abounds, batch failures and data errors, auto triaging, RPA-based process automation, and regression suite automation,” explained Balakrishna.  

AI Living Labs 

AI Living Labs is a program led by ICETS, which helps create innovative solutions for clients by contextualising emerging technologies. The team leverages the Infosys innovation ecosystem’s design thinking, technology, and design capabilities to incubate and deploy at scale. 

Balakrishna said Living Labs offers innovation as a service to Infosys’ clients by bringing together business context, technology and design expertise. “We partner with clients to enable entire organisations to reimagine their businesses and to shape the organisations through emerging technology-led innovations. This is characterised by rapid iterative prototyping, creating real experiences,” he added. 

Future of work 

“Our vision is to have digital workers work in tandem with the human workforce,” said Balakrishna. He said that their digital worker should be able to connect the real world with the virtual world in which they understand the intent, respond to questions, and take action from humans, but leaving the decision and control with the humans.

Balakrishna said that their patented ‘Microbot Framework’ is a step towards their digital vision that involves the creation of digital workers and a workforce that can perform high-end tasks like humans and is platform agnostic.

Infosys believes in a four-pronged strategy of scale agile digital, energise the core, reskill, and expand location to strengthen relevance to clients and drive accelerated value creation for the future workplace. 

Some of the initiatives for a futuristic workplace are Live Enterprise@Infosys, which senses, feels, and responds in real-time; a mobile-first approach via the Infy Me mobile app, with 250+ features, and a modern, hybrid, and secure workplace that bring together technologies like borderless ODCs, virtual collaboration tools via Infosys Meridian that enable a remote-first workplace that mirrors the offline experience. 

Using AI Internally 

Citing Infy Me, Balakrishna said that the response has been phenomenal. He said that they have seen many of their key processes become faster and more responsive with a hyper-personalisation experience with behavioural trends to make all the key transactions available to the user on the go. “After the internal success, we are also seeing interest for the platform among our clients as seven clients have already been onboarded and many more are in discussions,” he added. 

Infosys uses Infosys Fraud Detector (machine learning-based solution), which provides technical assistance to teams such as HR recruitment, background verification, and others. In confirming the genuineness of applicant profiles received by verification and validation, this reduces the manual time significantly. 

Infosys also uses platform-agnostic AI and RPA solution repositories to ease and enhance multiple human capital management (HCM) processes, including resume and job application filtering using AI. “Using this, we let go of the manual work of filtering hundreds of resumes received for interviews,” he added. 

As part of new technology adoption, Infosys has successfully modernised its enterprise storage platform. This platform uses the latest storage disk technology, which drives enhanced performance by up to 10X compression and deduplication advantages, along with a data availability guarantee. “This initiative delivered power savings of 46 per cent for this landscape,” shared Balakrishna.

Moreover, its ‘Infrastructure as code’ initiative delivered 1,200+ playbooks for automating platform-related processes across the hybrid cloud. 

Infosys believes it resonates with employee needs and responds with a value proposition that delivers meaning, purpose, and value for them, thereby reducing attrition. In addition, the company ensures that its people are continuously learning and create opportunities for every employee to navigate the future through some of the initiatives that it has launched. 

This includes LeX (for anywhere, anytime learning), iRise (their reward and recognition tool), Skill Tags (for proficiency in different technologies), Digital Quotient (to keep track of their digital capabilities) and many more. 

Edge over others 

“As an industry-leading service provider, it is our constant endeavour to create solutions that support our clients on their digital transformation journey. As the demand for AI continues to rise, we look toward creating future-proof solutions that will address the problems of tomorrow,” said Balakrishna. 

For instance, as part of their Infosys Cobalt offering, Infosys recently launched their applied AI cloud. This solution provides its clients access to AI hardware, open-source AI software as a service on their hybrid cloud infrastructure, and harnesses edge AI capabilities. 

“Through the AI cloud, our developers and project teams can easily access our clients’ AI hardware and software across private and public clouds and develop contextualised services that deliver AI-first business processes for them,” said Balakrishna. 

Further, he said their clients could continue harnessing their data estates, open-source data and curated data exchanges on the cloud to develop and train their AI models. “Additionally, they can avail services delivered by any hyperscale cloud provider to scale and future-proof their AI-powered transformation, enabling them to build an advantage in a competitive business ecosystem,” said Balakrishna.