Indian IT sector’s talent management to evolve, Infosys CTO says at Davos

By Divya Chowdhury and Haripriya Suresh

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) – Infosys expects the way the tech industry manages talent to shift and has already begun experimenting with how this transformation will occur, its chief technology officer said in an interview Davos, Switzerland.

India’s No.2 software services exporter is one of several IT companies that use the ‘pyramid’ model – where a company employs the highest number of staff at entry level, and fewer at each subsequent level.

This model, which allowed IT companies the scale they needed to become tech behemoths, could now change.

“I think see the talent model will undergo some change. What shape and form it comes (in), I think, that’s something that we’ll have to see,” Infosys CTO Rafee Tarafdar told the Reuters Global Markets Forum.

“We are experimenting internally,” he said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos.

Jobs in the tech industry were expected to be impacted from the use of generative AI, but Tarafdar said the situation is continuing to evolve as the company has had to create roles that previously did not exist, such as in responsible AI.

Infosys is trying to ensure upskilling of its staff while simultaneously creating specialists in new roles, Tarafdar said.

“In that way, I would say between the continuum, everybody is moving – either re-skilling or evolving their current skills, or we are hiring completely new type(s) of people,” he said.

Infosys recently built four small language models for banking, IT operations, cyber and enterprises broadly, which it said it is providing as a service to clients.

Looking ahead, Tarafdar expects more talent will be required in the areas of responsible AI and model engineering.

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(Reporting by Divya Chowdhury in Davos and Haripriya Suresh in Mumbai; Editing by Jan Harvey)