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What Salil Parekh said
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Salil Parekh, CEO of Infosys, discussed the scale of AI adoption among large enterprises, identifying six growth areas with a combined addressable market of $300-400 billion. He highlighted legacy modernization and agent-based process automation in financial services, energy, and telecom as key opportunities. Parekh noted that while many companies experiment with AI pilots, few have embedded it into core processes, and he emphasized the importance of top-down sponsorship, citing his own use of foundation models and coding agents to demonstrate AI's accessibility. On workforce, he detailed Infosys's strategy to reskill all 300,000 employees on AI tools, with recent graduates initially learning without AI before incorporating it. He reported recruiting 20,000 college graduates in the last fiscal year, with plans for another 20,000 this year, and predicted AI will expand the scope of work rather than reduce labor.
Key takeaways
Infosys sees a $300-400 billion addressable market across six AI growth areas, including legacy modernization and agent-based processes.
Parekh reskilling all 300,000 Infosys employees on AI tools, with recent graduates learning coding without AI first.
Infosys recruited 20,000 college graduates in FY2026 and plans another 20,000 this year.
Parekh believes AI will expand the type of work, not reduce labor, enabling non-coders to build systems.
0:00And how fundamentally will AI change how large companies operate, let's say, over the next decade?
2:41What makes a company an organization that is either doing one or the other, that is not either just there temporarily or deeply deeply remaking their business?
4:31And what other sectors or functions are sort of at the forefront?
5:05So, what are the strategic decisions that leaders are having to make about investment, about infrastructure, about governance?
9:03... question which is I think the biggest question and the one that is maybe the most newsworthy which is ultimately do you believe that AI will reduce labor inside large organizations or expand the scope of what companies are able to build?
All right, it's wonderful to be with Salil. If we were in Mumbai or actually any world business capital, Salil is the CEO of really one of the most phenomenal companies in the world in technology, Infosys. One of the great modern Indian companies. And so, welcome Salil, the CEO. And I want to start off by obviously the elephant in the room, of course, is digital transformation. And obviously what the AI revolution is doing to not just reshape just technology companies, but the entire enterprise. And so, you work with literally the world's largest organizations. And from your perspective, seeing them every day, what is the real scale of the shift? And how fundamentally will AI change how large companies operate, let's say, over the next decade?
So, first, thanks for having me and Infosys here. It's incredible to see what you've done, so congratulations. What we're seeing on AI with large enterprises is a huge adoption. A few weeks ago, we laid out where Infosys sees the big growth opportunities. There's six areas where in total we see something in the range of 300 to 400 billion dollars of addressable market. And today, we're already seeing examples of large programs at clients. So, take one of the six areas, which is modernizing what is going on in old technology, bring it to new areas, legacy modernization. And we see clients in financial services, we see clients in energy, we see clients in telco, big companies US and European working and making all of that happen. Another area that we see is building out of agents and there many of the processes you take a process like KYC in a bank, you take a process on an accounts payable in many organizations horizontal, you take a process on knowledge capture and sharing in wealth management and all of those are being driven by agent technology and the change that's coming in. So, from our perspective huge opportunity for that sort of growth. But many many companies experimented with AI pilots and but far fewer and I think this is going to be a key theme this week and I know there's a bunch of CEOs are going to be talking about this. Very few have embedded AI into their core business processes.
Someone referred to it as being a tourist or a resident. What makes a company an organization that is either doing one or the other, that is not either just there temporarily or deeply deeply remaking their business?
So, that again I think we have seen a shift where large companies are doing this as a resident at scale. So, we have examples and again in the session we had a few weeks ago we had 12 clients come in and talk about the programs they're doing at scale. All available publicly. One of the clients, a bank working on a huge modernization program. Another consumer products business working on how to enhance their revenue growth by customizing agents through our purchase history. Another a telco building AI in their billing operations to make agents go much more efficiently. So, what we are seeing today is a large adoption. Not every company is doing it with the early big transformation players are making a huge bet on this. In the banking world for example, we think the adoption is the quickest today. There's already a lot of work on regulation which AI can help automate. And then there's growth for example, we're doing some work in credit management where in a bank with AI agent technology the bank team can assess credit much more efficiently and target their product more clearly. So, we think the growth is at scale not anymore just sort of testing or picking.
So, there's three big areas in terms of sectors, there's financial services, energy, telco. Those are big sectors right now that we see. In terms of functions, we see of course code development that are many large foundation models that are very efficient in that. We also see the usage and drive of agents. And then the whole area of customer service, that's an area that's getting a lot of traction by using agents to make changes at enterprise level.
And for boards and CEOs, it's not so much whether you do it, it's just how you organize it yourself around it. So, what are the strategic decisions that leaders are having to make about investment, about infrastructure, about governance?
So, there I think the success and as in any big tech revolution change comes from driving it with sponsorship coming from the very top. And the places where I have seen success typically the leadership are personally engaged in it. To give you an example, the CEO and the board very much involved with the CEO very active day-to-day. So, when we have clients visiting our campus in Bangalore, right next to my office, I have a workstation in the room next door where I have three large foundation models and their coding agents. And I can show the CEOs or other executives that have come how I can build systems quickly. I can personally build systems quickly, which is obviously surprising to many people.
Parekh, S. (2026, May 13). Infosys CEO Salil Parekh at Semafor World Economy [Interview transcript]. Semafor Events. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/904941/
MLA
Salil Parekh. "Infosys CEO Salil Parekh at Semafor World Economy." Semafor Events, 13 May. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/904941/.
BibTeX
@misc{parekh2026_904941,
author = {Salil Parekh},
title = {Infosys CEO Salil Parekh at Semafor World Economy},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Semafor Events. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {may},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/904941/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
