Tech giant Infosys admits automation is dramatically reducing hiring needs – The Australian Financial Review

Despite many advocates for artificial intelligence and automation playing down the long-term risk to employment levels, Indian tech giant Infosys has revealed its early adoption of the technology has already dramatically reduced the numbers of people it is hiring.

In an exclusive interview with The Australian Financial Review, Infosyschief operating officer PravinRao said the deployment of artificial intelligence was instrumental in it cutting its annual hiring of new full-time staff by more than 10,000 in 2016-17.

Mr Rao said the company hired6000 full-time employeesin 2016-17, downfrom 17,000 the previous year and had averaged numbersbetween 15,000 and 20,000 in the years since the global financial crisis.

"Our industry's growth is down a bit too, hence the lower number, but we do think the big investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning we've made in the last two years means our number of new recruits willbe below 10,000 a year from now on, at least for the foreseeable future"Mr Raosaid.

However, Mr Rao said Infosyshad so far made nobody redundant because of automation, rather it had "relieved" 11,000 people last year frommanual, repetitive tasks in service linessuch as testing, application development, maintenanceand infrastructure management, and redeployed them to jobs requiring more creativity and imagination, such as user experience design.

Infosyslaunched its first artificial intelligence platform, Mana, last year and Mr Rao said it had already reduced the number of humans required at the company's support desks.

"A big proportion of the tickets are for routine stuff, where 99 per cent of the time it's the same solution, so that's been the low-hanging fruit in terms of automation," Mr Rao said.

The next-generation AI platform, Nia, was released in April amid claims it can assist with more complex business problems, such asforecasting revenues and what products need to be built, understanding customer behaviour, deeply understanding the content of contracts and legal documents, understanding compliance, and fraud.

Infosys was moving its people further up the value chain too, Mr Rao said. Since October 2014 it has trained 140,000 of its 200,000 staff in design thinking a problem-solving strategy at its corporate university in south-western India, and Mr Rao said a more sophisticated level of consulting had resulted.

"We had a large consumer goods client in the UK, four quarters in a row they could not close their books within five days," he said.

"In the past we might have looked at a downstream solution for why their month-end closing programs were failing, they might have ended up spending $30 million on a new package. Instead we were able to put a team on this and find it was data quality issues upstream that were the culprit, so we built a dashboard identifying these and enabling data inputsto be cleaned up in almost real time."

The dashboard has since been built in to a product,HawkEye, which Mr Rao said had clients around the world.

Even though Infosys was not hiring at the rate it once was, Mr Rao said such creativity would always ensure the world created enough jobs for most of its population.

"Things get automated and we move on to new things, it's been happening for all of human history," he said.

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Tech giant Infosys admits automation is dramatically reducing hiring needs - The Australian Financial Review