Infosys AI Day: AI Is Not An Opportunity Risk, It’s An Execution Risk: Infosys Co-Founder Nandan Nilekani

After Infosys inked a partnership with Anthropic to advance enterprise AI solutions, Co-founder of Infosys Nandan Nilekani noted that there is no opportunity risk linked to artificial intelligence but execution risk.

"When cloud came, we could do a shift, lift and shift. You could take the app from your in-prem and move it to the cloud. So you could do a lot of things to get going. But this time, it's not that. This is a fundamental change in the way we do things. Obviously, there's a technology dimension and it's all about having AI native architecture," he said during Infosys AI Day 2026. 

Highlighting challenges for the talent pool ahead, Nilekani, noted, "We cannot run business the old way. And businesses have to change, the customer journeys have to change. All those things have to change. It's a huge challenge for talent. Talent will have to deal with a world where writing code will not be the goal."

Also Read: Infosys Shares Surges 4% After Pact With Anthropic, Nifty IT Rises 3%

He further noted that in this non-deterministic world due to the expanding realm of AI "one clear learning we have is modernization of legacy systems cannot be deferred anymore."

"What happened over the last 60-70 years is people would not replace the legacy system, they just added to it. So if you go and look under the hood of a large enterprise, they will have mainframes from 1960, they'll have minicomputers from 1980, they'll have LAN from 2000, they'll have all kinds of things. And all coexisting in silos. That is over," he said.

If you really want a firm to take advantage of AI, you have to fundamentally clean this up.

Nilekani also hinted at big announcement this week on Indian-based sovereign models. Earlier today, Infosys partnered with Anthropic to unlock "AI Value across Complex, Regulated Industries."

The collaboration will begin in telecommunications with a "dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence to build and deploy AI agents tailored to industry-specific operations."

The Bengaluru-headquartered company noted that this will further "expand across Industries, financial services, manufacturing, and software development."