New Delhi: Homegrown IT major Infosys on Wednesday announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with US chipmaker, Nvidia. As part of the partnership, Nvidia will offer its artificial intelligence (AI) models, tools, applications and compute infrastructure to Infosys, which in turn will train 50,000 of its over 3.36 lakh employees on Nvidia’s AI stack through a dedicated centre of excellence (CoE).
In a stock exchange filing, Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and chairman of Infosys, India’s second-largest information technology (IT) services firm by market capitalisation, said that the company was “transforming into an AI-first company to better provide AI-based services to our clients worldwide.”
“Our clients are also looking at complex AI use cases that can drive significant business value across their entire value chain,” Nilekani also said, adding further that the company is in process of developing “end to end AI solutions.”
Applications of the strategic partnership will be made available to Infosys’ clients, as demand and capability ramp-up. Some of the key applications include a computer vision offering through Infosys’ Video Analytics platform, which in turn will be based on Nvidia’s Metropolis computer vision infrastructure platform.
Infosys will also offer custom enterprise large language models (LLM) through its Generative AI Labs, by using Nvidia’s ‘NeMo’ LLM framework. Translational use cases based on Nvidia’s Riva generative AI platform will also be made available to Infosys’ clients, through the latter’s ‘Cortex’ platform.
Infosys’ generative AI applications are presently being offered through the latter’s ‘Topaz’ AI platform for clients, which chief executive Salil Parekh expressed bullishness on during the company’s Q1FY24 quarterly earnings call on 20 July. during a post-earnings press conference, Parekh said that the company had 80 active client projects in generative AI as of the first quarter, and was in process of training 40,000 employees in generative AI skills.
“We are working with clients on both open-source and proprietary generative AI platforms. Our training is on many of these different platforms. We have built some tools on open-source platforms that we are using internally in areas where we do software development. We are becoming an AI-first company, where we use these tools internally as well as externally,” Parekh said at the time.
The move comes at a time when all of India’s IT service providers are focusing on generative AI in order to augment a weak tech spending environment due to global macroeconomic headwinds. Infosys, which had reported 15.4% annual revenue growth in FY23, slashed its FY24 revenue guidance to 1-3.5%—one of its lowest in recent years—during its first-quarter earnings call. More details are expected on 12 October, when Infosys will be announcing its second-quarter earnings for FY24.
The share price of Infosys has risen 4.3% this fiscal until Wednesday, closing at ₹1,490 apiece on the BSE.
