Infosys To Reduce Bench Strength And Focus On Automation, Says Vishal Sikka

Vishal Sikka, CEO of Infosys, India’s 2^nd largest software firm has recently announced his company’s futuristic plans regarding efficient utilization of talent and the resources.

Infosys is aggressively pushing towards automation and focusing more on areas such as Virtual Reality (VR) now a days. The company plans to deploy automation across its top customer projects and be more profitable by reducing its bench.

As of now the company has 81% human resource utilization i.e. it has 9,000 minds sitting on bench doing nothing. Sikka further said that the company wants to increase the revenue per employee from $50,000 currently to $80,000 per employee in near future.

Infosys And The Future

All of this is in line for making Infosys a $20 billion company by the year 2020. Sikka also revealed how the company is doing futuristic work with its top customers like Toyota Motors in areas like autonomous driving and driverless cars.

“We see now digital connectivity, we see now computing making its way into places where they were never before — so if you look at some places where we inhabit, cars for example, assistive driving, driverless car infrastructure has become quite commonplace…assistive driving capabilities are there in every car now…we do a lot of this work, we do a lot of this work in our own driving and automation of the driving experience for companies like Toyota and Boeing and so forth,” said Sikka at a conference in Mumbai.

Infosys is also working on diverse projects involving different technologies. Its area of work range from industrial internet to technology components of machines such as landing gears for aeroplanes.

“What we can think of services that can transcend space and time constraints. One example of this is the work we have done with GE — the landing gear traditionally used to have four sensors and the landing gear is an incredibly important part of an airplane..these systems need to have 100% reliability otherwise people die. We have recently together with GE instrumented these landing gears around 30 additional sensors..we can basically do everything that we can think of on the digital twin of the landing gear. All its operational behaviour, its operational parameters, its health, predicting its useful remaining life and how it intersects with the number of remaining flights planned, things like that…,” explained Sikka about the work done by Infosys  on the landing gears.

This sure sounds like a big achievement for the Bangalore-based software giant. The company is also working on various home automation projects with GE.

Here are some thoughts of Sikka about automation and the job market:

“We obviously hear about the threat of automation and what it will do to jobs — I have always viewed that as an opportunity for automation because our ability to model complex systems is fundamentally limited to our understanding of it, the way it used to be, whereas systems of course continue to evolve.”

Automation is the future and is increasingly being adopted in many other companies as well. Sikka explained this in a very interesting way citing an analogy between horses and automobiles:

“The shift to automation is inevitable. There is no doubt that it will happen, there’s no doubt that it is already happening. It is not to make the horses run faster and faster or to feed them better or to give them better scheduling — it is to turn the horse-cart into an automobile.”

Infosys is already trying to reduce its bench through its ‘Zero Bench’ initiative. This will help the company in being more profitable while bringing it closer to its $20b target.