Automation fallout: Infosys lets up to 9,000 staff go over past year

Infosys Ltd has "released" 8,000-9,000 employees in the past one year because of automation of lower-end jobs, the company's human resources head Krishnamurthy Shankar said on Thursday, adding that these employees are now working on more advanced projects.

"We have been releasing about 2,000 people every quarter and also training them in special courses that will help them in their new assignments," Shankar said on the sidelines of an event organised by the Bengaluru chapter of Global Shapers, a body backed by the World Economic Forum.

Shankar, who joined from Philips in 2015, added that with automation set to increase, the number of people Infosys hires will continue to come down over time.

The hiring slowdown may not only be a reflection of automation, it is also likely to be the result of the company not doing as well this financial year as it expected, says The Economic Times. Infosys added 5,700 people in the first nine months of this year, compared to about 17,000 in the same period last year. In the December quarter, Infosys' total employee strength actually declined - an extremely rare occurrence for India's No2 information technology services company. The total strength fell by 66 to 1,99,763.

Most big IT services companies are investing heavily in automation of processes in their traditional businesses like business process outsourcing, application management and infrastructure management. Wipro has an automation platform called Holmes. The company's global HR head Saurabh Govil said in November that some 3,200 people were released through automation to do more innovative work. The target is to take that figure to 4,500 this fiscal. Such initiatives are helping companies improve their operating margins.

Shankar said Infosys has trained about 490 people in a first batch of machine learning and the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning and AI previously required expensive computing machines, but costs have now come down dramatically.