Infosys to give $10000 to teams with best innovation ideas: Sikka's letter to staff

Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka said company employees should “massively” embrace automation and drive innovation at the grassroots to meet fast-changing client demands. 

As he completed three years as the first non-founder CEO of Infosys, Sikka told employees in a letter that the software services major must solve challenging business problems of its customer through a “foundation of learning and entrepreneurship” approach in a bid to engage with them. 

“We need to massively embrace automation in the commoditizing parts of our core business, and bring grassroots innovation into everything we work on; software, wherever possible our software, must amplify our services in an increasingly software-defined world...Doing so requires us to reach back within ourselves and to learn, to exercise our learnability. Learn about artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, learn about new technologies, but most importantly learn to learn, to innovate, to build creative confidence,” said Sikka in the letter. 

Indian IT services companies have seen a shift in customer demand as most of their clients now seek technology services to be delivered using digital tools such as cloud. This has resulted in a sharp fall in revenues from traditional software maintenance services of such companies. 

Sikka said the “world around us” is experiencing a “profound and disruptive change largely driven by technology” and Infosys as an IT services leader has the opportunity to help businesses transform “fundamentally” using  automation and innovation. 

Sikka, the former SAP board member who was bestowed the responsibility to transform Infosys into a more digital and an agile firm, claimed the initiatives taken at the company during his tenure such as Zero Distance, Zero Bench, launch of AI platform Nia and the creating a culture of design thinking education amongst others were aimed at driving a “foundational” transformation.  “...every one of the initiatives has been geared towards this transformation that is incumbent upon us. These initiatives are foundational, not transient, and we will see their results for many years to come.”

The Infosys chief executive said one of the notable operational achievement of the company during the past three years has been “a 15-year high utilization” rate last quarter. He took credit for continuous revenue per employee growth for six quarters in a row. 

Sikka asked his employees to also convey their own aspirations and the ones for Infosys’ growth. 

He said employees at Infosys have been keenly involved in bringing out innovative ideas. The company said it would reward the top ten most innovative teams from Zero Distance with $10,000 each, every quarter, in order to recognize the best talent. 

“Our Zero Distance session in Bangalore two weeks ago (the 40th ZD townhall) was a landmark one; a team demonstrated a cable-cleaning robot that can clean and coat power transmission lines automatically, solving a key challenge in power transmission, to amazing praise from the client. But what I found even more impressive, was that when I asked them if a variant of this robot could be used to, say, automatically clean and refill Bangalore roads, they said that they had in fact thought about it, and even made a rudimentary prototype! More than anything else, it is this that makes me proud. That our teams are developing the creative confidence to develop great ideas but also think about other, related, problems, and bring beautiful solutions to these,” Sikka wrote to employees.