Infosys builds driverless golf cart with IIIT Delhi, to invest in AI

Firm also seeks to skill more of its people in emerging areas such as drones, robots and cloud

This story has been amended to rectify an error

Infosys is testing a driverless golf cart built jointly with the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, using open source technologies, to demonstrate its capability and to tap growing global opportunities for autonomous and connected vehicles.

Vishal Sikka, chief executive of Infosys spoke about the “How, What and Why” of adopting greater automation and AI at the 36th annual general meeting and disclosed  the company's attempt to create a pool of thousands of engineers with capability to work on projects in artificial intelligence and tap business opportunities.

“Autonomous driving is something every automobile company will get into, and we are trying to build talent around this,” Sikka said, highlighting the Infosys self driving golf cart at its Mysuru campus was built using open source technologies. “Advances in AI are automating more and more cognitive work that people perform.”

Both during the AGM and during the quarterly results on 13th of July, Sikka identified the academic institute as IIT-Delhi. After a reader alerted that the collaboration is with IIIT-Delhi, Business Standard reached out to Infosys. The software firm on Monday clarified that the collaboration is with IIIT-Delhi and not IIT-Delhi.

In April 2016, Infosys foundation, the philanthropic foundation of Infosys committed grants of Rs 24 crore to IIIT-Delhi to establish the Infosys Centre for Artificial Intelligence at its Okhla campus. The centre will facilitate work on both fundamental and applied aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and focus on areas such as, robotics, machine learning, computer vision, AI for software systems, large-scale data analytics, etc, Infosys had said in a statement.

Sikka, during the AGM, said that Infosys is part of Toyota Motors’ connected cars project, and would look to skill more of its people in emerging areas, such as drones, robots and cloud.

Sikka, who completes three years as the first non-founder CEO of Infosys, says the company has been able to slowly make the shift towards building software led services model that generates high growth and  high margin business in areas such as mainframe modernisation and API economy.

He said that the company's software offerings such as NIA, Panaya, Skava and Edgeverve grew 42 per cent in the last fiscal, with NIA, the artificial intelligence platform being implemented with over 70 customers.