About 9,000 employees were “released” by Infosys in the past one year due to automation of lower-end jobs, said company’s human resources head, Krishnamurthy Shankar. These people are now working on more superior 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,” said Shankar on the sidelines of an event.
Shankar added that with automation set to increase in force, the number of people it hires will drop over the time.
The number is falling down already. Though all of it may not be a reflection of automation, it may also a sign of business not doing well this fiscal.
Notably, Infosys added 5,700 people in the initial 9 months of this fiscal while it had added about 17,000 in the same period last year. The company’s total employee strength actually reduced in the December quarter – a very rare occurrence for India’s No. 2 IT company.
Large IT corporations are investing a lot in automation processes in their customary businesses such as BPO, application management and infrastructure management.
Wipro has an automation platform called Holmes. Some 3,200 people were released through automation to do other innovative work, the company’s global HR head Saurabh Govil said in November.
Infosys’s automation platform Mana helps enterprises automate their processes using data from machine and human experience. CEO Vishal Sikka urged staff to embrace automation and innovation to endure the rapid and disruptive shifts in the world of technology.
