Confluence Americas brought together Infosys executives, key customers, and analysts. Across several days of sessions, keynotes, and 1:1 meetings, there was ample time for the HFS crew to lean in on Infosys’ focus and glean important takeaways from its leaders, customers, and partners.
The following summarizes HFS’s views of what Infosys landed at the event and what areas the company might still need to work on for continued market success and customer growth.
Positive takeaways
- Generative AI: Infosys spotlighted its investments concerning internal transformation leveraging generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). By leading as an example, Infosys adds credibility when speaking to clients about how its GenAI services can make an impact. Infosys can also show how it can document outcomes for clients’ businesses.
- Infosys Topaz: HFS continues to be impressed with Infosys Topaz, an AI-first set of services, solutions, and platforms. Topaz uses GenAI technologies and includes more than 12,000 AI use cases, 150+ pre-trained AI models, and 10+ AI platforms. As firms adopt AI and incorporate GenAI and large language models (LLMs) across their teams, Topaz users will benefit from Infosys’ ongoing investments in this platform.
- Winning deals: Infosys’ ability to continue to win mega deals is commendable. HFS believes the “OneInfosys” message, where Infosys combines all its capabilities in a simple-to-understand and easy-to-consume idea, resonates with the market. This message, along with robust account management and continued delivery excellence, attracts new clients to invite Infosys to respond to large-scale proposals.
- Ecosystem of solutions: At Confluence, Infosys brought together partners, customers, industry analysts, and financial analysts as part of its OneInfosys efforts. Bringing together all aspects of its go-to-market and customer ecosystem fully illustrated the HFS OneEcosystem™ philosophy.
- Managing organizational change: Infosys has continued to grow despite the departure of senior leaders, showing its operational and organizational maturity and ability to minimize disruptions for itself and its customers.
- Potential for growing digital agency solutions: The OneInfosys model becomes apparent in high-growth-potential areas, such as the CMO suite, where technology, people, and processes are increasingly fluid in creating experiences. Infosys is beginning to bring tech and business capabilities together for CMOs. With its technical chops, it is working with CMOs and their teams to more effectively collaborate with customers, using data, analytics, and automation to improve operational agility in fast-changing markets.
- Technology agility: Infosys invested in its FluidITy solutions for applications engineering, partner solution integration, and managed SaaS services. Infosys FluidITy codifies how its teams can help customers bring their IT operations closer to the business and find creative solutions using new talent models to accelerate solution design, development, delivery, and support. Enhancing GenAI as part of its software engineering is a great step toward becoming a market leader in a space HFS is keen on seeing grow.
- Giving back to people and the planet: Infosys continues to be recognized for its efforts in sustainability, and its ESG topics continue to push an agenda informing the market about how it has met its carbon neutrality goals since 2020. One of Infosys’ activities for attendees was building bicycles for underprivileged youth. During the activity, customers, Infosys executives, and analyst teams spent a couple of hours assembling bicycles for the local Boys and Girls Club. Participation was optional, but nearly three dozen attendees took part and built 20 bikes for the organization. Infosys is commendable for applying its success to both global and local causes.
Development opportunities
- Link technology agility with business agility: While Infosys is winning big deals, it still appears to be selling mainly to technology leadership, as large enterprise CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs heavily attended the conference. While IT budgets look to remain flat, technology-related spending is growing as increasingly the line of business is becoming the sponsor or budget holder for new projects. Therefore, to access this shift in spending, HFS feels Infosys needs to invest in a stronger business narrative to ensure they are considered. After all, this is where the Big4 and Accenture continue to challenge Infosys in the market.
- Outcomes must drive the narrative: Infosys must transition to lead with the impact and outcomes it can deliver instead of tech-enabled services. Recently, Infosys has been aggressive in outcome-based pricing models to share the risks and rewards with customers. These cost-centric solutions aid CIOs reallocating budget to new projects. However, as Infosys develops its industry and LOB marketing, it must articulate to its buyers the outcomes and value creation objects they can achieve with these models.
- Industries must frame the challenges: While horizontal solutions underpin how an industry problem is solved, Infosys must pivot its messaging and solutions selling capabilities toward industry challenges and solutions. Infosys must build on success stories like its recent win with Liberty Global. In other areas, like healthcare and life sciences, its value proposition takes a bit of digging to flush out as a meaningful business-outcome-centric solution.
- Enhance its ability to provide thought leadership for greater market engagement: While we applaud Infosys for managing the recent departures of key executives effectively, it needs to identify which leaders can become market evangelists for the firm. These individuals must bring a voice to Infosys’ strong operations and ability to grow customer engagement and tie industry messaging to the firm’s strong operational and technical capabilities.
- Overcome its lack of leadership diversity: While Infosys’ broad workforce is improving its gender diversity ratio, Infosys leadership continues to lack diversity. The Infosys executive leadership is dominated by Indian men, while many of its competitors are diversifying to better represent the customers they serve across lines of race and gender. In today’s market, customers seek firms that bring diverse ideas. When otherwise qualified leadership lacks the global diversity of the markets they compete in, they may not be as compelling as prospective customers’ other options.
The Bottom Line: Confluence showed how Infosys continues to create an opportunity for customers, influencers, partners, and executives to congregate and share opinions on emerging trends, thought leadership, and inspiration for future growth prospects.
As the rate of change and the need to test, adopt, deploy, and support existing and emerging technologies continues to accelerate, Infosys’ clients are leaning on it to bring an ecosystem of solutions. Confluence showcased Infosys’ preparation to support technology buyers and leaders as trusted partners. However, Infosys needs to advance its ability to tell its story to business leaders who need technology to solve the outcomes directly related to the activities their teams are tasked to deliver outcomes on.
