Co-Founder & Chairman, Infosys
Nandan Nilekani – Chairman and Co-Founder, Infosys and Founding Chairman UIDAI (Aadhaar)
Nandan Nilekani is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Infosys Technologies Limited. He was the Founding Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in the rank of a Cabinet Minister from 2009-2014. Nandan has co-founded and is the Chairman of EkStep Foundation, a not-for-profit effort to create a learner centric, technology-based platform to improve basic literacy and numeracy for millions of children. In January 2023, he was appointed as the co-chair of the “G20 Task Force on Digital Public Infrastructure for Economic Transformation, Financial Inclusion, and Development.”
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About Nandan Nilekani
Nandan Nilekani, Chairman and Co-Founder of Infosys, addressed the company’s 45th Annual General Meeting on June 23, 2026, where he dismissed concerns that artificial intelligence will replace IT services firms. Nilekani stated that AI will "amplify those who move with purpose and adapt with speed," and argued that enterprise AI adoption still requires integration, governance, cybersecurity, and modernization expertise. He noted that Infosys is already working with 90% of its top clients on AI initiatives and sees a potential $300–400 billion AI services opportunity by 2030. Nilekani also cautioned that implementing AI in a dysfunctional way could be counterproductive, giving the example of employees using AI to expand and then summarize emails without improving overall productivity. In separate remarks, Nilekani discussed the challenge of transitioning from a founder-led company to one led by non-founders, describing it as "an order of magnitude more complicated" due to the importance of values and culture. He said that the AI transformation has given Infosys an opportunity to "recalibrate and re-energize and reduce bureaucracy" and expressed confidence that the company would eventually manage both an AI transition and a leadership transition.
Transcript (17 segments)
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Nandan Nilekani0:02
Thank you Shilpi, and it's really wonderful to be here. I want to thank Nikolai for this opportunity. I thought I'll tell you a bit of my story and the connection to today's topic.
I am one of the founders of Infosys, a company set up 45 years back. In these 45 years, except for three years, there has been one or more founders in the company. The three years where there was no founder, the company went through a tumultuous time.
So in 2017, because of a certain situation that had arisen, I had left by then. I had done all the work at UIDAI Aadhaar and all that. I had to go back. I thought I was going back for a few months. Nine years later, I'm still there. So I am the last founder, you know, like the last dinosaur, the last Mohican, the last founder.
So I was already in my mind grappling with the issue: how do I do a transition to a leader who will not be a founder? In other words, while we have normal succession planning where we replace one CEO with another, when it comes to replacing a founder with a non-founder, it's an order of magnitude more complicated because it's all about the values that you have and the culture and so on. So I was already grappling with this question of how do I do this transition.
And then this whole AI thing came along, and people started questioning why we exist. If software development is going to be done on cloud or Cursor or Codex or whatever, then why do we even need you people? Do you need to exist? So we had suddenly come to this existential question.
So then I realized, you know, I also then realized that maybe this was an opportunity for me because being an optimist, I always look for the upside. I said maybe this point where there will be a transition to a future leader at some point as the chairman, I could also use this opportunity to embed the values once again into the company so that it would be instilled for a long time.
And so in some sense, I made the AI transition of Infosys actually become also a way to change the culture, to create a sense of urgency, to get speed. And getting speed, this is a company with 300,000 people and 20 billion in revenue, so to get speed in this company is, you know, over 40 countries. So I think my first job was how do we get this.
And then I also realized that we have to do this only by ensuring that we have strategic autonomy in the world. How to be relevant in the world of AI, and a few things stood out to us. One was that the role of a firm like Infosys would be to orchestrate all the things in a company, in an enterprise, because an enterprise needs orchestration of all the various tools it uses and so on.
It was also about helping our clients retain optionality in the choice of the AI tools, because I firmly believe that the leaders in AI will keep changing. There'll be new companies, new ways of doing things. All that is going to come in, and that's going to require therefore companies to be nimble and agile in being able to adjust to these changes. So one of the key value adds we could offer was how do we allow optionality in the choice of our technologies.
And the third thing is we realized that enterprise context is so important. An enterprise is defined by its context, its rules, its policies, its processes, its data, and some of it would be tacit knowledge in people's heads, post-it notes stuck on the computer. So fundamentally, getting enterprise context together, we realized, was something very useful for our customers. So we figured out how to think about what would be our value proposition and relevance in this new world.
But equally importantly, I think we used this as an opportunity to get speed because we had to move very quickly. We had to move the whole company, 300,000 people. We had to train everyone to be ready with these new skills. We had to learn how to do agents. We had to learn how to combine agents and humans in doing things. All this required a lot of work.
It was also an opportunity to break down the silos of the company because there were different silos. People were doing different things. And we said let's use the AI transformation as a way to completely break down the silos and have everyone in the company working on the same, have the same way of doing things.
And that took some effort because people were quite possessive about the way they did things. But we have used this to actually break that down because I firmly believe that you cannot have AI benefits and AI productivity unless the company works with one voice, in unison. Everybody has to work to the same goals.
And I think AI is not just applied artificial intelligence. It's aligned individuals. All the individuals in the company have to be going in the same direction, otherwise AI could make it worse. A dysfunctional company can go into warp speed with AI. You know, if I'm sending a mail to somebody, I may write a one-paragraph email, use AI to make it 10 paragraphs, send it to that guy, and he uses AI to reduce 10 paragraphs to one paragraph. What have we achieved? Both of us have used AI on either side, but the company's productivity has not gone up.
If you have a company which is having camps and different people, then for all you know, agent swarms of one business will be fighting with the agent swarms of another business, and it'll be doing it 24/7. So in other words, we have to be very careful that we don't implement AI in a way that is dysfunctional because that could actually be counterproductive.
And therefore, I think the lesson I learned is use this AI transformation to also get the company to march to a single drummer, to get everyone aligned to do the things that they had to do, and to make sure that innovation was captured from every part of the company onto a common way of doing things, a common fabric.
So I feel now that while there will be at some time in the future a transition to a non-founder, the AI has actually given us an opportunity to also recalibrate and re-energize, and reduce bureaucracy, reduce silos, and take people to a different level. So finally, I think I feel confident that whenever we do the AI transition, we will also do a chairman and founder transition. Thank you very much.