MD, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Infosys
Infosys CEO Salil Parekh at Semafor World Economy
This is a partner session produced by Semafor's commercial team. Semafor's editorial staff had no role in this video's creation or distribution.
About Salil Parekh
Salil Parekh, CEO and Managing Director of Infosys, has been discussing the company's talent strategy and AI adoption in several public appearances. At the company's 45th Annual General Meeting in May 2026, Parekh stated that Infosys recruited more than 20,000 college graduates during fiscal year 2026, bringing its total workforce to over 325,000 employees. He noted that the company's attrition rate was 12.6% for the year, which he described as a good outcome, and said the company planned a similar hiring target for the following financial year. Parekh also said Infosys had secured approximately $15 billion in large deals, of which 55% were net new, representing a 24% increase from the previous year. Parekh has emphasized that AI will expand rather than reduce the scope of work. At the Semafor World Economy event in May 2026, he said Infosys sees a $300 to $400 billion addressable market in AI-first services by 2030, with growth opportunities in financial services, energy, and telecommunications. He described the company's approach to reskilling all 300,000 employees on AI tools, categorizing them as "AI aware, AI builders, and AI masters." Parekh also stated that many clients are moving beyond AI pilots to enterprise-wide deployments, and that he believes AI will enable individuals who do not code to build systems and create outputs.
Transcript (23 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
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?
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Salil Parekh0:56
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.
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Interviewer2:41
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?
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Salil Parekh2:58
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.
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Interviewer4:31
And what other sectors or functions are sort of at the forefront?
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Salil Parekh4:35
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.
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Interviewer5:05
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?
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Salil Parekh5:18
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.
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Interviewer6:14
With some help, right?
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Salil Parekh6:15
With some AI or foundation model help, yes. But it then becomes more sort of visible to people, to CEOs, to make that.
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Interviewer6:25
You always did as CEO?
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Salil Parekh6:26
No, this is just a few months. A few months ago I put this in because some of this technology could be a little bit daunting for maybe some of the senior people. And this is a way to make it really quite easy, in fact, to use. But just giving a few instructions in English, what simple code, just to show that it can be done in that manner.
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Interviewer6:53
So, maybe next year's World Economic Forum we should be bringing this here live on stage. Maybe we can do this on Wednesday or Thursday this week.
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Salil Parekh7:02
Okay, that's fine.
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Interviewer7:04
See, this is the moves fast, my god. All right, let's talk about also another big theme, which is of course how AI is reshaping the workforce. It's a huge debate in America. What do you think is going to happen down this area? How are leading companies approaching the reskilling question? What models are proving most effective?
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Salil Parekh7:23
So, yeah, I think there are different approaches. The approach we've chosen is to reskill all our 300,000 employees on AI tools. So, first, we do a lot of work where in the first few months of training we encourage the recent graduate to not use any AI tools and learn how software development is done and then bring in after two or three months the usage of tools and see how things are enhanced. One of the things maybe not that much talked about is AI tools the code that are created is not the most efficient. And so we have people who are experienced who can then evaluate how that code is and make sure it becomes more efficient and use properly. A lot of it is not easy to go into production or be running right away. So we have teams that can make that be production ready so to speak. So it's not that what you build is immediately ready for the real world. So the reskilling is most critical and then in terms of roles we just finished our financial year on March 31. We recruited 20,000 college graduates in that year. This year we have the plan for another 20,000.
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Interviewer8:48
How many last year?
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Salil Parekh8:50
So 20 the one year the year before that we were at about 14,000.
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Interviewer8:54
It's growing.
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Salil Parekh8:55
So it was more this previous year. But if you go like three years ago we were more in the 40,000 type of.
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Interviewer9:03
No I'm saying three years back it was up and down like that. Yeah. Well actually which leads me to my final 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?
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Salil Parekh9:27
So that our sense very much is it's going to expand the type of work. So to give you an example today just in coding there are individuals who don't code who, because they have an idea or a concept, can get that output, build a system, and make things happen which they couldn't do in the past. And that's true in many of the different skills that we're seeing. So, our view really is it's going to be an expansion of the work as opposed to a reduction.
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Interviewer9:56
Okay, well, on that very positive note, Salil Parekh, thank you so much. Please join me in thanking you Salil for joining us.