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Last updated November 8, 2024
In AI Origins & Evolution

How Microsoft’s Copilot and Meta’s Llama Turned Infosys Into an AI-first Company

Illustration by Nalini Nirad

Published on November 8, 2024
by Mohit Pandey

Infosys, the Indian IT giant that claims to be doing incredibly well on generative AI , has begun swiftly integrating AI into its offerings. For the past two years, the company has been pushing not just its clients but also its employees to use AI tools for their work.

For instance, Infosys developers have been using GitHub Copilot for over a year, which now has about 20,000 users generating nearly a million lines of code every few weeks.

Puneet Chandok , the president of Microsoft India & South Asia, affirmed this. “Around 18,000 developers at Infosys have written 7 million lines of code using GitHub Copilot,” he said, adding that Copilot has boosted productivity, streamlined workflows, and transformed how Infosys engages with its customers.

Addressing concerns about AI’s impact on jobs, Infosys has reassured its employees that AI would serve purely to amplify their potential. To support this vision, Infosys has provided each employee in different departments with an AI assistant tailored to their specific roles.

Meanwhile, at the Building AI Companions for India event in Bengaluru, Infosys CTO Rafee Tarafdar spoke about how Infosys was using Microsoft Copilot internally. “In 2022, we began our journey to become an AI-first company, aiming to integrate AI into every aspect of our business. This meant embedding AI into our workflows and ensuring that all employees are AI-aware, skilled, and empowered to use AI tools effectively,” he said.

Copilot is All You Need for Employees

“In my role, I interact with clients across various fields—blockchain, quantum computing, AI—and finding relevant information can be challenging,” said Tarafdar. This is what, he said, led the team to launch InfyMe , a personal assistant that helps employees access information quickly, improving efficiency in client interactions, powered by Microsoft Copilot.

In addition, the leadership also prioritised continuous learning, recognising that the 370,000-strong workforce stayed updated. Infosys introduced a personalised learning platform called Springboard to help employees acquire new technical skills and adapt to complex scenarios, making this approach mainstream across the organisation.

“One key lesson we learned is that providing AI tools alone doesn’t drive adoption.” Hence, to fully realise the impact, Infosys trained all its employees to be AI-ready. This meant that whether they worked in finance, HR, sales, or operations, everyone was trained to effectively use AI tools and become skilled “prompt engineers”.

Beyond this, Infosys has developed roles for AI “builders”, who create applications for our clients, and AI “masters”, who have created around 15 specialised models, including a powerful 2.5 billion parameter called Infosys Topaz BankingSLM , a pre-trained model for banking and IT operations that outperforms other language models in finance benchmarks.

As the demand for generative AI applications grew, Infosys built an AI infrastructure platform using Azure and its own AI cloud called Infosys Topaz. “This platform has enabled our employees to innovate at the edge, developing apps in weeks rather than months,” said Tarafdar. These applications are used not only by our clients but also by institutions like museums, enhancing their impact.

Llama for the Clients

At Meta’s Build with AI Summit held in Bengaluru last fortnight, Infosys announced a partnership with Meta to utilise the Llama stack, a collection of open-source large language models and tools, to build AI solutions across industries.

As an early adopter of Llama 3.1 and 3.2 models, Infosys is integrating these models with Infosys Topaz , the in-house AI platform, to create tools that deliver business value. One example of such a tool is a document assistant powered by Llama that improves the efficiency of contract reviews.

“We are building industry-wide solutions. For market research, we have built a proof-of-concept and, internally, we are leveraging many Llama models for our AI-first journey,” an Infosys representative told AIM . The person further added that they have several other use cases, such as production use cases and document summarisation.

A Lot More to Come

In its latest Q2FY25 earnings call, Infosys yet again emphasised on its dedication to generative AI, but shied away from spilling the revenue details. On the brighter side, the company has finally revealed that its working on small language models for its clients for various applications.

“It’s an incredible approach that leverages various open-source components, along with a narrow set of industry data and Infosys’ proprietary dataset,” said Salil Parekh, CEO and MD.

“It’s a differentiated strategy, and although we haven’t shared much yet, we are already having promising discussions with clients. The work has begun, and we’re integrating generative AI deeply across key areas,” he added.

Parekh also shared a notable case involving building a multi-agent framework for a client, where the agents handle specific business processes almost entirely on their own. “We are building enterprise generative AI platforms and multi-agent frameworks for clients,” he said.

NVIDIA Coming in

Besides Microsoft and Meta, Infosys has also partnered with NVIDIA to incorporate NVIDIA AI Enterprise into its Infosys Topaz suite to enable businesses to rapidly implement and integrate generative AI into their workflows.

Meanwhile, TCS is creating AI solutions using NVIDIA’s NIM Agents Blueprints for sectors including telecommunications, retail, manufacturing, automotive, and financial services. Its offerings feature NeMo-powered, domain-specific language models that can handle customer inquiries and respond to company-specific questions across all enterprise functions, such as IT, HR, and field operations.

Wipro, on the other hand, with its AI-powered consulting and extensive employee reskilling efforts, is looking to build an “AI-powered Wipro” that drives efficiency and transformation. “Net-net, I think GenAI will be positive for us and for the industry,” said Srini Pallia, CEO and MD at Wipro, adding that they are investing big into GenAI.

“We have now trained and certified over 44,000 employees on advanced AI, and we also have a significant number of employees actively using AI developer tools across the company for all our clients,” said Pallia.

Moreover, Tech Mahindra’s recent Indus 2 launch, a Hindi-centric AI model, is powered by Nemotron-4-Hindi 4B, targeting local language engagement. The company has reskilled 45,000 employees, supporting their AI roadmap through an internal proficiency framework.

Looking ahead, Infosys aims to foster a collaborative working model where AI re-engineers processes and automates tasks, creating a future where humans and AI work seamlessly together. “Our next steps focus on building agentic systems and AI ‘workers’ to drive productivity and allow us to reimagine how we work,” concluded Tarafdar at the Microsoft summit.

📣 Want to advertise in AIM? Book here

Mohit Pandey

Many companies are working towards advancing the AI field by offering open-source frameworks.

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Success Stories

Infosys – Microsoft: Agile transformation of legacy system and IT delivery

Like many enterprises looking at ways to better engage customers and partners and leveraging inputs from these interactions to drive future strategy, Microsoft Corporation wanted to modernize its Partner Program portal and improve the interface to enhance the way it engaged its resale partners across the globe. This portal resides at the core of Microsoft’s business and is the primary channel through which its partners access services such as enrollment, product training, and incentive programs; to name a few.

Given the importance of the Partner Program portal to enable revenue, Microsoft wanted to improve its partner experience with the portal and improve the speed of updates. It decided to modernize the existing platform and embrace an Agile development model.

Microsoft engaged Infosys to deliver an enhanced Partner Program while simultaneously introducing and scaling Agile practices into the project.

Hansa Iyengar, Senior Analyst – Advanced Digital Services at Ovum, studied this program and identified some critical success factors for large Agile engagements. Read this case study to understand more about this program, how Infosys delivered this complex program successfully, and the value Microsoft got from this successful engagement.

Click here to download the report