HFS attended the Infosys Confluence Americas 2024 event along with many of Infosys’ customers, partners, and market makers. We came away with three key observations:
To Infosys’ credit, there was a genuine atmosphere of stability, with most of the firm’s key executives still energized and driving their respective areas for the firm. This contrasts sharply with some of Infosys’ competitors, which are suffering from wholesale management turnover and significant uneasiness among their leadership.
While there was some level of AI-washing and still too few scaled and in-production GenAI examples, it’s fair to state that Infosys’ event theme statement of “Enterprise AI is coming of age” was spot on. We heard about their AI journeys from numerous enterprise clients across industries, including banking, manufacturing, high tech, telecommunications, retail, and CPG. Yes, GenAI was front and center, as it should be as the newest and shiniest AI permutation. Still, the conversation and overall discourse were at the level of embedding AI into the enterprise and, daresay, democratizing it.
We also welcomed significant attention to governance, guardrails, foundational investments, and a decent focus on hitting the core trifecta of business benefit across cost, growth, and experience. GenAI remains a smoldering platform, but it is gradually catching fire and helping organizations push applied enterprise AI. HFS credits GenAI with kicking the door open for enterprise AI.
As HFS has shown (see Exhibit 1), enterprise tech spend is basically at 50/50 parity across IT and business. The CIO’s office is no longer—and has not been for quite some time—the sole conduit and funding source for enterprise innovation. Yet, most services firms persist in selling to and engaging with CIOs. One of the more interesting facets of the Confluence event was Aster—Infosys’ new bouquet of offerings targeting the evolving needs of CMOs. Aster was announced in June and is being led and curated by Infosys’ marketing leaders, including its CMO, Sumit Virmani. The logic of the offering is that, as CMOs are increasingly tasked with driving growth, they require AI-enabled capabilities to succeed.
Sample: HFS Pulse, 2024, 605 Global 2000 enterprise executives
Source: HFS Research, 2024
Aster unifies Infosys’ end-to-end capabilities from consulting to design and engineering, technology builds, and operations. While Aster is new, its capabilities (see Exhibit 2) are not. Infosys has invested in creating an offering to formalize and launch Aster. However, we need examples, and the value to enterprise CMOs must be showcased much more prominently. Their plans to take a focused “micro-vertical” approach to rolling Aster out—across sector segments such as banking, automotive, telco, and others—demonstrate a reasonable targeted strategy. Client testimonials indicate this approach is working. The Aster offering and its approach to market engagement have potential, but they need hardening.
Source: Infosys, 2024
Infosys made bold promises about enterprise AI beyond “just IT” but acknowledged its roots as a global IT provider to support the foundations required. The Topaz platform and AI-powered “cobots” are designed to drive AI adoption at scale. It pitched Topaz as the linchpin for enterprise AI, but how it stacks up against other players’ offerings remains a big question. The idea of “cobots”—modular AI tools acting like digital Lego blocks—sounds like a modernized twist on object-oriented programming; modules should be cohesive but loosely coupled. They may display innovative capabilities, but the proof will be how well and fast these AI systems integrate with existing legacy infrastructure and deliver functional value.
Topaz itself runs on Cobalt, Infosys’ branded offering for cloud solutions. Infosys reiterated Cobalt’s importance as the backbone of AI success, but this isn’t exactly breaking news in today’s tech landscape. Infosys’ industry-specific solutions and co-innovation platforms show potential, but they’ll need to move from vision to execution before we can gauge real impact. One bright spot? The expansion of their Springboard initiative, aimed at democratizing tech education, is a smart play for brand alignment with social responsibility goals.
Infosys also presented its detailed efforts to develop agentic AI solutions with a compelling example of using the technologies to augment a client’s customer experience—an office coworking spaces company. Their agentic tool was able to combine general chatbot capability to communicate with their customers over WhatsApp before, during, and after their coworking experiences. We generally saw the firm’s ideas and focus evolve into advanced agentic AI solutions, which HFS believes is critical to our 2030 services tech vision (see Exhibit 3).
Source: HFS Research, 2024
These five phases of services tell the complete story of the evolution of the industry from adding people to perform work to scaling these same people with the smart use of platforms, AI-driven agentic tools, and ultimately fully autonomous technology-led services where work is effectively replicated at scale with embedded intelligence.
It is a credit to Infosys that the company did not speak alone. Customers and partners were brought to the stage to discuss facets of their AI journeys, from foundational aspirations to value realization, such as SDLC and order of magnitude POC production improvements. A repeated theme that came through was “walk, crawl, run” with a twist to become “augment twin autonomy.” AI usage to “augment” enterprise operations is where most GenAI has been positioned today. Early-stage agentic AI is working its way into learning the job “twinned” under the oversight of a human handler, essentially reversing the “augmentation” dynamic. Fully capable agentic AI will operate with true “autonomy” and reinvent the nature of the enterprise. The potential capabilities of augmentation and twinning were on display, but autonomy is sensibly being approached with a mix of anticipation and caution.
Technology services providers routinely overpromise and underdeliver. Currently, no company has a claim on unlocking deep commercial AI value for enterprises. Progress is being made, but most of what is promised—by all companies, not just Infosys—is still aspirational. To make this technology a reality for customers, it must BE real. Infosys outlined a solid program at Americas Confluence 2023. This year, we saw good evidence of progress with clear examples of Infosys baking AI into everything it delivers and how it is helping customers safely democratize and make progress with AI.
As HFS laid out in our Service Tech Vision 2030 (see Exhibit 3), Infosys needs to contemplate its changing role as services become software. Increasingly, drinking your own champagne in the age of enterprise AI requires more than the status quo spiked with AI.
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