- Published on January 23, 2026
- In IT Services
Why Mphasis CEO Believes AI Can No Longer Be ‘Lipstick’ on Legacy IT
Mphasis CEO Nitin Rakesh said enterprises must extract intelligence from old cores with the help of AI.
Image by Nalini Nirad
- By C P Balasubramanyam
After decades of layering new software on top of ageing enterprise systems, companies are running into the limits of legacy technology, believes Mphasis CEO Nitin Rakesh.In a detailed post-earnings interaction, Rakesh said the IT services firm is positioning its NeoIP platform—enabling agentic AI-led IT operations and observability—to help enterprises rethink how they modernise and operate long-standing core systems, using AI to extract intelligence and drive change, rather than simply automate around legacy constraints.
Rakesh traced the challenge back to the evolution of enterprise computing. Early software automated manual record-keeping in sectors such as banking and insurance. While the digital and cloud era improved reach and experience, core systems, many built in the 1970s and 1980s and still running on mainframes, largely remained untouched.
Enterprises, he added, have continued to add layers without fundamentally transforming systems of record. “We keep putting li
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C P Balasubramanyam
Bala is a journalist covering Indian tech companies and startups from Bengaluru.
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