Infosys’ shift towards becoming an AI-first company is beginning to reshape both how it works with clients and the kinds of technology roles it is building internally, according to Chief Technology Officer Mohammed Rafee Tarafdar.
Tarafdar told Fe that the operating model of IT services firms was moving from AI-assisted delivery to AI-native engineering, creating demand for a new set of specialised roles.
“Roles like forward deployed engineers, responsible AI engineers, model engineers, AI security engineers, and techno-functional engineering managers will become critical,” Tarafdar said.
Specialized Roles
The shift reflects the growing integration of AI tools across consulting, engineering and deployment cycles. Tarafdar said consultants increasingly work alongside clients to define problems and quickly build working solutions using the company’s AI platform.
“Our consultants today sit with our clients, understand the problems and then using the product discovery and vibing tool from Topaz Fabric they can figure out the solution and build a prototype, and then engineer a production-scale application by the end of day,” he said.
A key part of the company’s approach, Tarafdar added, is the use of pilot programmes to test AI deployments before scaling them across organisations.
“Pilot programmes are key to demonstrate proof of value and build a strong business case for enterprise-wide scaling and adoption. Where value-driven identification of pilots and scaling are done, we have seen significant success,” he said.
Infosys has also begun setting up what it calls “AI living labs” with clients. These labs create a testing environment where enterprises can experiment with new AI and agentic technologies before integrating them into business processes.
“The AI living labs that we are setting up with our clients are helping build an experimentation infrastructure using which emerging developments in AI and agentic can be continuously vetted and applied to augment, automate and reimagine workflows,” Tarafdar said.
Beyond Code
The company is also working with AI-native platforms as part of its strategy. Tarafdar pointed to partnerships with firms such as Cognition and Anthropic to accelerate engineering and modernisation work in enterprises.
“Today in most enterprises, most of the engineering work is in brownfield — enhancing, fixing, improving and modernising existing systems and code,” he said. “We are using Cognition Devin for brownfield engineering and modernisation projects in combination with our Infosys Topaz Fabric.”
The agentic tools help automate parts of the development cycle, including analysing processes, extracting business rules and enabling forward engineering on modern architectures, he added.
Despite recent volatility in technology stocks triggered by new AI tool launches, Tarafdar said companies such as Infosys retain an advantage because of their deep understanding of enterprise systems.
While AI adoption is changing the skill mix within the company, Tarafdar said Infosys would continue to hire freshers, though across newer technology tracks.