Infosys Limited American Depositary Shares Q1 2027 Earnings Call

A very good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining Infosys's first quarter financial results. My name is Rishi, and on behalf of Infosys, I'd like to welcome all of you today. I would first like to invite our Chairman, Mr. Nandán Nilekani, and our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Salil Parekh, for an important announcement, which will then be followed by our business updates. Kindly note, Nandán will not be taking any questions. Sirs, over to you. Thank you, Rishi.

It's great to be here with all of you. I thought I would take this opportunity to make an important announcement. As you know, Salil has been CEO of Infosys for almost 10 years. He came, I don't know how many of you were there 10 years back, but he came at a time when things were slightly unstable. He brought in calmness, focus to the company from INR 10 billion to INR 20 billion, completed the transformation for the digital era and started the real differentiation in the industry. Salil himself asked to retire on March 31st, 2027, and Infosys has been looking at his succession. Today, I am delighted to tell you that the board has appointed his successor, our new CEO, who will take over on April 1st, 2027. He's from Infosys. He's been somebody who is a true blue Infoscion.

He has worked in Infosys for 31 years. He's worked in every part of Infosys, be it in delivery, be it in sales, be it in account management, starting a new DC in Bhubaneswar, everything. He's someone who I think everybody likes, respects. He's an uncomplicated guy who focuses on what needs to be done. His name is Ashish Dash. Ashish is based out of L.A. He's been there for some time. He will move back to India and in the next 2, 3 months, he will do some CEO coaching or whatever. Then from October 1st, Salil will take him on as his mentee and prepare him for the role so that he can take on this role of managing a complex INR 20 billion company in a very transformational time.

I just wanted to let you know that Ashish will be the new CEO, and I'd now like to request Salil to say a few words about Ashish.

Thanks, Nandán. First, welcome everyone. This is an incredible time for us. As Nandán shared, I've known Dash for a very long time, working closely with him. A huge congratulations to him in making sure everything he does works well into the future. He's had an amazing portfolio. The way he's built it, the way he's crafted it in terms of the clients he's worked with, in terms of the people he's worked with. There's a tremendous set of opportunities from that onto the overall company, the learnings from that as we apply to the overall company. Ashiss Dash, also a very collaborative individual, working well with all of the various components within Infosys, and having been here for a long time, has made sure he's learnt everything and also understood how all different parts of the company work.

Huge congratulations to him and looking forward to working with him as we do the transition over the next few months.

Thank you, Salil. I now invite Jayesh to join Salil on stage to commence the quarter updates. As always, for this section, I will request one question from each media house. With that, let me invite Salil for his remarks. Over to you, Salil. Thanks, Rishi, and thanks, Nandán, for that.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here. Our revenue growth for Q1 was at 2.4% year-on-year, and 1% quarter-on-quarter in constant currency terms. We had a one-time revenue impact of a client decision during the quarter. Our AI services revenue was 8.2% of overall revenue in Q1. Our large deals, $3.6 billion at 61% net new operating margin at 21.1%, free cash flow at $955 million. Our earnings per share were up 15% year-on-year in INR terms. We saw strong acceleration in our AI work, as I shared earlier, with AI revenues at 8.2%. This is growing at double-digit quarter-on-quarter for the last several quarters. With this momentum, we see long-term relevance of our services for our clients, which are all driven through AI.

From our delivery team, over 80,000 employees are working on coding tools such as Cloud Code or Codex or several others for our clients, for our work inside. We see strong traction across the six areas of growth. The new growth that we see in AI, our hexagon for AI strategy. We see client work, for example, in building agents for processes, work on data, modernization, and using coding tools. We are building a team of frontier engineers to support our client work. Our plan is to have 6,000 frontier engineers over the next few years. We have built a platform, Topaz Fabric, that enables our clients to get the benefits of AI while keeping the sovereignty of their own data within their company. Our clients are able to work with any foundation model, closed, open weight, or on the cloud, on their own servers.

Our clients are able to optimize token cost, which has become very critical now, to make sure it's the appropriate for the type of work they're doing and not out of hand. Overall, we continue to see the macro environment remaining uncertain. With our Q1 results and a view for the rest of the financial year, we are changing our revenue growth guidance to 1.5%-3% year-on-year growth in constant currency terms. Our operating margin guidance remains the same at 20%-22% operating margin. Thank you. With that, let's open it up for questions.

Thank you, Salil. We will now open the floor for questions. The first question is from Ritu Singh from CNBC TV18.

Thank you very much. I know you've asked for one question, if I may, Salil, you've given us a big news in this quarter. To begin with, since you speak about how you've brought in and Mr. Nilekani spoke about how you brought in calmness at a time when the company was going through quite a bit. Even now, you're speaking of this global uncertainty because of which you've had to, again, pull down your guidance as well. Why decide to leave at a time like now instead of perhaps looking at an extension? I wanted to understand. With the new CEO coming in, any mandate for the new CEO that you could highlight for us more clearly, and perhaps that's something the investors would also want to know.

On the earnings, of course, the reason for this revision downwards, if you could give us a little more color on what you're seeing in the environment, where's the weakness, where's momentum picking up? Some of your competitors, like Tech Mahindra, have been talking about irrational competitive pricing. Wipro's also spoken about that a bit. What are you seeing in the environment? With a 1% kind of a growth in the first quarter, do we assume the second half will be meaningfully better if you're to reach that upper end of the 3% guidance you're speaking about? Just on AI, if you could update us, how the revenue's moving? Is it proceeding as per what your expectations were? Any updates you could share on that front as well, as far as revenue contribution from AI is concerned?

Let me start with the first one. I think you had that question collectively for some time now. We have the answer. As I look at it, I'm really delighted with the role I've played here. We've taken the business, as Nandan said, from $10 billion to $20 billion. It's working very well. The digital transformation, now the AI transformation is launched. I'm really delighted, working well with our clients and with an incredible team that we have inside. That's what I would like to say on the first one. On the second, I think what we are seeing is an environment where a little bit sort of combining the third piece as well. AI services is growing extremely well. Double-digit growth, if you look at it like quarter-on-quarter, if you look at it on several quarters in the past.

We see that those six areas that we have identified, like the process, the agents, the data, the engineering, all of those are working extremely well with our clients. We are now looking at revenue growth in each of those areas. Our pipeline is even larger than the 8%, which is the revenue today. We see good traction in that. Therefore, we feel there's a good long-term relevance of our services to our clients because this is going to continue to grow as we look out into the future. Now, the question on the guidance. We had a one-time impact that I shared with a client decision. There are factors related to what is going on in the macro environment, which we talked about. There are factors related to the volumes in the quarter. We look at the large deal number, $3.6 billion, 61% net new.

We see a lot of support in that. I think there are six of those deals which are consolidation deals that we have been the beneficiary in, as an example. There are four deals which are just under the $500 million range, just like a mega deal. We see really good traction. The pipeline there is looking good. When we balance, we decided to look at our guidance in a different way. The upper end of the guidance was really based on if the macro was improving. We now see the macro, it may improve, but not at the level that we were thinking initially, that's how we really constructed the guidance.

We have tremendous view that this is a good place for Infosys to operate with AI the way it's looking, and all of the work that we're doing on large deals gives us continued traction.

Salil, Nandan's question of why you didn't decide to stay on and what the mandate of the new CEO is, and if the second half will be better. If you could clarify all of those points.

There, I think as I shared earlier, my sense is I've been fortunate to have a tremendous sort of opportunity in what we've done at Infosys over the last many years. Having taken the business From about $10 billion to $20 billion. It's been an incredible journey. That, with the team we have and with the client work we've done, that's been a fantastic sort of an outcome. On the mandate, I think as AI strategy is well put together and Dash has been part of that. Our thinking is, that strategy we want to execute on, of course, there will be some things which we will look at in terms of fine-tuning, that's a natural course of evolution.

The strategy is very well in place to make sure that that goes into the next phase, making sure the partnerships we have with the various models, the Topaz Fabric that we built. Today, on AI, it's important that clients see that their own data remains sovereign to them. The way we build Fabric, it allows for the clients to do that no matter which model they're using. That's a very big differentiator we have, for example, in AI. The token cost, that will be an important factor, we think, in the future. We have built Fabric in a way that depending on the task you are using the foundation model for, it will use the right model, so you don't have to pay for the most simple task, like an expensive token cost and so on.

We think we are in good position in that. In terms of second half, first half, I think we have the guidance for the full year. We expect the normal seasonality that will come. We're not expecting anything unusual there.

Competitive pricing in the market that some of your peers have spoken about.

Yeah. Maybe they are seeing that. You should check with them.

Thanks, Ritu. The next question is from Rishabh Shaw from Moneycontrol.

Salil, if you could tell us your biggest achievement and what will you miss the most and what's next coming for you? On the performance, quarterly performance, how has been the TCV conversion? Because that's a worry that investors have. The third question is, two of your peers have highlighted that AI revenue is slightly lumpy, and it could be one or two quarters, post which you'll have to go and get those deals again. Is that something that Infosys is also seeing? Thank you. Let me start with the second one.

I'll come back to the first. I think the TCV conversion, we see a pretty good way of converting now. What tends to happen is, when you have a consolidation deal, the conversion comes a little bit quicker. When you have a transformation deal, it's a little bit sort of spread out. That's the normal sort of conversion we see. We don't see that it's suddenly changed, like in the last quarter or couple of quarters or so on. On the AI revenue, I think it's moving so quickly that it is a bit up and down in a quarter-by-quarter basis. Our thought is, that's why we are saying look at over the last several quarters, we see that double-digit type of growth quarter-on-quarter.

We will see sometimes it could be a little bit faster, but it's growing nonetheless. Meaning, if you look at the secular trend, we see that is pretty strong, and that gives us a little bit of the view that long term, there's a relevance of what we are doing on AI for the clients. For me, I think I'm very focused on what we have to do here at Infosys. We have a lot of things to get done. I want to make sure we remain in the leadership position, we win in the market, we are leading in AI, and I get a smooth transition done. That's really my focus. After that, I'll see what else happens.

Thanks, Rishabh. The next question is from Mansee Dave from ET Now.

Hello, good afternoon, Salil and Jayesh. Nice talking to you. Salil, my questions are on client spending, large deals, and competitive positioning. Talking about the client spending, client budgets remain selective across industries. Have you started seeing any improvement in discretionary technology spending, or are enterprises still prioritizing cost optimization over transformation? Talking about the large deals, Infosys has maintained a healthy large deal pipeline. How confident are you that these deals will convert into faster revenue growth? Every global IT company today is talking about AI. What would you say is Infosys' biggest competitive advantage in this AI-led technology cycle? Please start with this one. Which moment during your tenure best reflects the values and culture of Infosys? Thank you. Okay. There was a few.

I'll start with the first was a conversion of the TCV discussion. I think we see the large deals. We see a good traction of those. The values over the last few quarters have been strong. This quarter was pretty good. We see the pipeline to be pretty good on the large deals, and we feel there's a benefit of the consolidation that we are seeing in some of the large deals, which is definitely helping us as we go through it. The conversion, whether it's faster or slower, I think it's at the same type of a level, and we will convert those into revenue. With 61% net new, it already looks pretty strong in terms of the net new work, which we'll see. Obviously, the renewals are going pretty okay as well.

On AI, there's a huge differentiation that I find from what we are sort of working on. First, we have a very clear AI strategy with the six areas of focus. We are investing in it. We've actually taken. Jayesh has shared in the past, he will share also today, that we've invested in building out AI capability. We have, as I shared earlier, 8% revenue growing double digit Q on Q over the last several quarters. We have a good pipeline in that area. You look at some of the stats. We have 80,000 people working on the tools today for client work. It's not just training and so on.

What we built with Fabric, I feel is very differentiated because it allows clients to maintain control of their data, maintain control of what they want to do with the AI, and still use the different models, use lower costs. We have a harness through which they can leverage what they want to achieve with the foundation model. That is a significant move up in terms of differentiation that we've seen. In terms of values, my sense has always been Infosys has incredible values, and it's really been sort of a privilege to be associated with that and learn from it, and contribute to it. In many ways, it's a great fortunate thing that that could happen in the way that it has happened.

Thank you. The next question is from Shilpa Phadnis from The Times of India.

Hello, sir. Can you please give us some color on how your GCC portfolio is doing? Some of your peers who are slightly late starters are catching up. They're already looking at a billion-dollar in revenue run rate. I just wanted to understand from you how it's doing. Is there a milestone that you have touched? Secondly, there's also concern with Vanguard and Daimler and lot of other companies are chipping into the space. They are setting up their own GCCs. How much of that compression are you seeing in the market?

On GCC, in fact, my sense is you might have seen we launched the AI GCC concept some time ago, and that we had a client event a few months ago where all the leading GCCs of the country, their leadership teams were here in Bangalore on our campus, and we did a one-day session sharing with them what the latest developments were in overall and also in the AI GCC. Our traction on GCC is looking very strong. We don't externally share the milestone, but our revenue growth is good. Our work with them is good. In the GCC, there's always a life cycle. There are some which are expanding well, and there are some in the past where they have exited, and we've sometimes participated in that and so on. That continues. The overall GCC work, both within the GCC and the work we are doing with them, I think both are growing pretty nicely.

I have two questions, sir. When do you think AI-led revenues will be material enough to offset productivity-led compression that customers are seeing in the market?

Look, I think my sense is the AI-led revenues are extremely significant at 8% already. If you look at the growth trajectory, and if we execute on that well, and the growth trajectory continues, we can see now a long-term relevance of AI revenues to our clients from what we are doing. The productivity will also continue. I think it's both of those things, because when we shared our strategy in that hexagon, we had outlined a $300 billion addressable market opportunity. That's all new revenue. Also, the productivity will happen. The significance, I think already we can start to see.

If I can just add. If you look at when we launched our hexagon in February of this year, our AI revenue for Q3 was 5.5% of our revenue. Today, it's already at 8.2%. It's already significant. It's growing at a very fast double-digit, over double-digit growth. Right? At that pace, it is already becoming a growth engine in a way. That acceleration, it's becoming a long-term play in the way.

This is not reclassification in any format, right?

No. One last thing, sir.

On the status of hikes, Infosys has not called that out yet. Where are you on that? Secondly, also on forward deployed engineers. There's a lot of talk in the tech ecosystem about this. How difficult is it for a services company to sort of plug FDs into the existing workflows? There are several challenges that companies are facing.

Let me start with the second one. We'll come back to the first. On frontier engineers, we now have a very good plan which has been put in place some time ago to scale that up. We have a lot of capability within Infosys which are doing similar work. We are making sure that it works in the way that the frontier engineer needs to work with clients today. We've set the objective of 6,000 to make sure that the teams can work with different clients to make the impact. We feel we have a good understanding of how that works because the capability is really the engineering plus the business context, and that's something that Infosys was good at even before the AI wave of work had started. We are making sure that that becomes very much part of the future in that.

On the compensation increases, we will roll out our compensation increases in October and January in two parts. That's part of something internal that we have announced now.

Yeah. With most of the employees getting an increase in October, the senior employees will get it in January.

Thanks, Shilpa. The next question is from Avik Das from Business Standard.

Salil, good afternoon. Just three quick questions and one for Jayesh. You talked about how the macro perhaps hasn't sort of improved over the last 3 months, that you perhaps would have wanted to. Just wanted to understand, which are some of those parts of the macro that led you to first to increase it between 1.5-3.5? Now you sort of cut it down to 3. Which are some of those areas which did not really work according to your expectations? Number 2 is that would Infosys ever at all, at least in the near future, would you want the company to move into the AI infrastructure business data center, something that HCLTech and TCS has already done? The last question is, what would you classify, at least in your tenure, as the most challenging period?

Was it the COVID or is it the AI-led transformation for Infosys? Jayesh, one question on the margins. Once you obviously roll out the hikes and with the growth projection sort of tapered now, do you think you would be able to maintain the 20%-22% band at least for this year? Just wanted to know that. Thank you. Let me start off on the first one.

I think a little bit later, Jayesh can also add a bit of color. I think on the macro, it's more what we see in the environment. We had a sense that the macro was settling down, so we had a guidance where the upper end looked at maybe things would settle down in the second half. Things are a little bit more uneven, but at the same time, it could easily stabilize over time. We've kept the option, and we always have that ability because tech spending, discretionary spending can also come back if that happens. We are sharing more what we see today as opposed to a prediction of what is going to happen exactly in a certain time frame.

On the data center piece, in fact, we've internally reviewed what we want to do in terms of our balance sheet. We've had a discussion with the management team and also with our board, and we have decided to not do anything in that space at this stage. What was the third one?

Margin. I think my focus in that is making sure that we are very much focused today on what we need to do for this part of the work that I have to finish.

I'm very much sort of enjoying that, we'll come to that at the right time in terms of the tenure and so on. On the margin, Jayesh will have it, we will hold the guidance.

At this point in time, we have given a guidance of 20%-22%. If you look at our first quarter, we are at 21.1%. If you look at puts and takes of where we are, the currency will be a tailwind, at least where we see today. Project Maximus is working well. If you look at last three-year period, we have been consistently able to hold or improve our margins despite investment in business, whether it is AI, whether it is talent, or whether it is sales and marketing. We believe the project will continue to deliver value from pricing, from utilization, et cetera. That given, of course, we'll have headwind coming from the compensation in the second half of the year, we are very confident at this point in time of the guidance band that we have given.

Thank you, Avik. The next question is from Haripriya Suresh from Reuters.

Good evening, gentlemen. One is I wanted to get some color on each of the verticals as well within financial services. Retail has seen some sort of head hit this quarter as well. Some of your peers have called out some percentage of AI deflation in their portfolio. Obviously, there's growth coming from AI, but also existing portfolios see some sort of deflation. If there's any number you can provide for that. Also, is outcome-based pricing becoming a larger part of your portfolio? Are there certain deals that tend to see more outcome-based pricing than others? If there's any kind of quantification you could do for that'd be very helpful.

I'll start on the industries. Jayesh will add a little bit, and then let me address the other one, which is on what we see on the outcome-based pricing and the compression piece that you mentioned. On the industries, what we see right now is, for example, financial services. We see the growth in that part of our business will be higher than the average growth within the company. In energy utilities part of our business, we will see something similar. We still see, for example, in retail, some constraints in terms of the growth, and we are not yet seeing the pickup in that. There might be other things that Jayesh will add. On the compression, I'd said in the past, we do see that in some places across our portfolio, but we've not externally quantified that compression at this stage. Was there anything else? Outcome-based pricing.

On outcome-based pricing, we see clients have a stronger interest in that, but typically, it's not so much that it's become a large part of our activity, but there is definitely more discussions on it, and typically when the investment needs are heavy for transformation, it becomes more part of that discussion. It's not that we are shifting massively to it, but there is definitely more discussion on it.

Are there some kind of deals that tend to have discussions?

There is no particular type. It's more, I think, a function of are the clients going through a transformation, and is there a need for some upfront investment which can then translate into a transformation, and then the outcome gives a benefit of that transformation.

Thanks, Haripriya. The next question is from- Sorry, just one.

Sorry. Just to add to what Salil was saying on segments.

Financial services and insurance, both we expect to deliver higher than the company average going forward or for the rest of the year. Manufacturing, while we had an impact coming from one of the clients, which we had called out last quarter as well. Despite that, manufacturing has grown very well at close to 1.5% or slightly over 1.5%. I think that's commendable considering the headwind that the sector has seen. Life Sciences, we will see benefit coming on back of the acquisition in healthcare and Life Sciences. The only two segments that continue to see challenges is communication and retail from that perspective. Just to add, on the outcome-based pricing, that's one of the specific tracks within Project Maximus as well.

There is a leader at the organization level who is working with all the segments and driving outcome-based pricing. We have a very specific focus on that.

Thanks, Haripriya. The next question is from Beena Parmar from The Economic Times.

Thanks, Salil. Just a bit on the consolidation deals, the six consolidation deals. Which spaces are these in, and how many of these are large deals? Secondly, Infosys has lost some of the existing renewals, at least three in the know. What are the factors that led to that? What are your reasons? On the guidance also, if you could just extend a little bit on the color on why really the upper limit was reduced. Do you see macroeconomic environment further worsening or do you see that conversations have been a little different from last quarter? Finally, are you still looking at acquisitions and investments, and which spaces will these be in? Lastly, what next for Salil Parekh?

On the first one, I think the consolidation deals, the ones I was referring to, all in the large deals. Those are not the ones. We were only saying within the large deals, we see those many consolidation deals. We are not specifying in which areas, but these are typically in the bigger industries that we operate in. There's big companies who are looking to consolidate across partners, and that's where we've seen it. We're not specifying which one where we see that. What was the other one? Sorry. You lost some renewals.

We don't comment on any specific deals in the environment in any case. However, we are quite clear that our focus overall is to make sure that we're working with clients on projects and contracts that make economic sense to us, but no specific comment beyond that.

Okay. No other specific comment beyond that.

We want to make sure that economically it makes sense to us in some of these situations as well.

Guidance. The guidance, I'll also request Jayesh.

I've also said a few things, but he'll add to it. What we see is given where we were in Q1 with the outcome that we had with one of the delivery client decisions that I shared, we want to make sure that we have a guidance that reflects all of that. Looking at the changes, whether it's in volumes, whether it's in some level of pricing mix, that's how we've built the guidance. As we go through the year, we typically reduce the band as well. Instead of two points, it's now a one and a half point band as we go through the quarters. That's how we've built the guidance. Jayesh will add to it to your other question.

I think for me, really, the attention is on what we are driving through for this year, making sure that we continue to lead in AI, making sure that we continue to win market share, and making sure that we have an absolutely smooth transition. I very much enjoy what I'm doing. I'm sure once all of this is done, I'll have time to focus on what's next. Acquisitions, we are continuing to look at acquisitions. We have a good pipeline in that. We did the acquisition on life sciences, healthcare. We did the acquisition on insurance. We have other areas that we have an interest in. We have a view in geography that we are looking at some geographies where we could do more work, and those are good geographies. We could do more in some of the other industries as well.

For example, we're not doing anything, but we've seen that there could be things we could do in telco, in financial services, a little bit more in healthcare. There are areas that we could do which are more service line oriented. We think there's good traction in where AI can be leveraged into processes and agent building. There's a pipeline, and we will continue with the acquisitions.

Just to add to what Salil was saying, I'll come to guidance in a bit. On the consolidation deal of the six deals that we have won, it's a $700 million of net new business that we have won. We have seen positive impact coming out of the consolidation deal, and we have been on the positive side of the market share. On the guidance, whatever happens in Q1 typically has a cascading impact on the whole year. While we will see benefit coming out of the acquisition that we completed in Q1, the one-off impact that we had in Q1, the softer than expected volume and price that we got in Q1 will have a cascading effect on the rest of the year in terms of guidance.

In terms of the large deal that we talked about with the European client, where we decided to not bid beyond a point because it did not make commercial sense, or economic sense, as Salil said, that will have an additional impact in Q4 as the deal comes to a closure in December. That is also baked in our guidance. If you compare to last year, we have additional headwinds coming from the lower on-site mix, as I called out in the last quarter, because of our conscious decision of de-risking our business model. The deal that we lost in the last quarter from the same European manufacturing client, and that impact which was baked in the original guidance as well. All of this cumulatively results in our guidance.

There are multiple models that lead to the lower end and the upper end of the guidance, and that's how the guidance is baked in.

Thank you. The next question is from Sanjana from The Hindu BusinessLine.

Good evening, gentlemen. Just two questions. Coming to rupee depreciation, how much of a tailwind has that provided to your margins in Q1 or going ahead? How do you see that panning out? The other one is, how is AI improving, or what kind of impact does it have on your employee productivity, and how is this affecting the revenue per employee metric? Just these two questions. Thanks.

I will start on the second one, Jayesh will come on the first. We have seen, if you look at not this quarter but the previous several quarters, we have had a good improvement in productivity, revenue productivity. We, generally speaking, see overall that there is a benefit from that productivity coming. Having said that, we are recruiting. We recruited last year 20,000 college graduates. This year we have a plan to recruit 20,000 college graduates. We have already done over 4,000 in the first quarter. Equally, we see that there is a productivity benefit that will continue to come through. Of course, you also have pricing issues within the market, those sometimes balance out. If I look back not this quarter, but the previous several quarters, we have seen a continuous sort of expansion of that.

On rupee depreciation, every 1% change in the currency or depreciation in dollar typically gives you anywhere between 15-17 basis points on margin. The important thing to note also is whenever dollar appreciates against rupee, it generally appreciates against most other currency also. We have roughly 45% of revenue coming from non-U.S. geography, that kind of offsets some part of the rupee depreciation benefit.

Thank you. The next question is from Uma from Deccan Herald.

Good evening, gentlemen. With the rise in security incidents around autonomous AI agents and recent breach at model hosting platform, it is about OpenAI hack. How are you updating your approach to safety and security? Just adding on to it, using cross-domain network, is it not a risk for your client database as AI tools will have full access to it? Also, tell us about the guardrails you have put in place for AI systems.

On the cyber, I think what we have done is made sure that, for example, when there was a whole discussion some time ago with Mythos, we had worked with the previous model, Opus 4.7, made sure that we got an understanding of some of the security protocols beyond that, and built an approach that enabled our clients to have an understanding of the vulnerability and how to protect against it. That's some work that we are doing with several clients. Our approach across cyber encompasses that. Related to the point that you made, I think each client environment has to have that sort of a cyber defense built, and we have a way to support our clients when we work with them on the cyber area beyond working just on the foundation model area. Our own approach to cyber within Infosys incorporates that as well.

That translates to when we do work for our clients or when we do work for our clients through our security operation centers and so on. That's broadly the approach we have.

Just one more question. You spoke about acquisition plans. One of your peers has invested in Indian AI firms. Do you have plans to invest, especially in Indian AI firms?

We, generally speaking, have a view on. We have a innovation fund which invests in companies which are in very early stage and where we don't have essentially majority interest. We have a small minority interest in that. More from the perspective of seeing if that early or new technology can be deployed across our client base or can be leveraged in some way. That's the way the innovation fund is working. We have several investments into that. Over the past years, a lot into data and analytics, but now in many other technologies. In that light, we will look at all opportunities that are there without specifically saying yes or no to what you're suggesting. In that broad context of the innovation fund, we'll look at it.

Thanks, Uma. The next question is from Rohit Chintapalli from Businessworld.

Hi, Salil. Give us an idea about the large deal TCV was about $3.6 billion with 61% net new. How much of this pipeline was tied to agentic AI and Topaz? The second part of the question is, what's the typical time lag when it comes to converting this TCV signing to AI-led deals, the recognition of these AI deals?

What has happened today with clients' discussions is almost every discussion has some element of AI and of Topaz Fabric, because Topaz Fabric is like a foundational thing. Many clients come, use it here, experiment with it, and are using it. We use Topaz across all of the work we are doing. It's not like the total TCV is for AI, but without that we are not able to participate because that's integral to the work that we're doing. The conversion is the same in the sense of when the deals are signed, typically, depending on the type of deals. If there are deals where have some level of transfer consolidation that ramp up pretty quickly. If there are some deals which have a transformation, then that activity starts, and then the deals ramp.

It's not like one thing for all the deals, but it's the similar thing of what we have seen over the past several quarters. It's not like suddenly the TCV has come and the ramp-up has not happened for a long period and so on.

On the transition, of course, does this transition all about strategic continuity? How should investors read into it? What do you want to see? Yeah. We have a well-defined AI strategy today.

We've looked at the Hexagon with the six areas of the addressable market. We are seeing good growth, the 8% of our revenue, the double-digit quarter-on-quarter growth. That's the strategy we will continue with as we go through into the next phase. Of course, I'll work with Dash very closely on the transition as well.

Thanks, Rohit. The next question is from Poulomi Chatterjee from Financial Express.

Good evening. Just a couple of questions. You mentioned just now that the new kinds of AI deals are also a mix of the more traditional ones and pure-play AI. How do you see the margins of the new buckets of AI deals essentially evolving? Also, I'm curious, Infosys had offerings for small language models, specialized models in banking and IT ops, I think. Do you see how is demand for these models, and has there been an uptick, especially since enterprises are moving more towards a more mixed model kind of?

No, absolutely. I think that's exactly what we are seeing. For the small language model for the banking is getting good traction. It's based also on a Finacle product set. A lot of the clients there, it's an easy way to leverage a small language model in. The parameter set is smaller, the cost of running it is smaller, the token usage is more efficient, and so on. The same for the IT ops. That's all part of that scaling. On the AI deals itself, we don't comment separately on the margin in terms of the quantitative value, but we are quite comfortable with the margin we are seeing.

Thank you. The next question is from Yash Vardhan from Mint.

Good evening. In response to a previous question on the mandate for the new CEO designate, you said there were some things that you would fine-tune. Could you just shed some more light on what these things would be? Second, amid all this talk of rising data center demand and slowdown in mainframe modernization, are you seeing clients spend more on memory chips, GPU? If yes, are you seeing that lead to some sort of a slowdown in the traditional infra management work? If I may squeeze a third question in. When it comes to deals and the demand environment, are you seeing AI make the market a little more competitive between the mid caps and the large caps, such as yourself?

On the first one, let me say this. I think our AI strategy is well-defined. We are focused on the six areas, and that will continue. We see good traction in that. We see good growth in that. It's now becoming a large part of our revenue with 8%. That will continue, and that is the driving part of it. The approach that we will take is always look at what's going on in the environment. We see, for example, today, there's a tremendous attention to token cost. There's a tremendous attention to ensuring there's a sovereignty of data within a client environment. The overall strategy remains the same. Those sorts of things we will evolve as we go along.

Related to the infra environment, the costs, as you mentioned, of memory chips and so on, I think in general, these are all areas, whether it's infra or other areas, where there's always a need for efficiency. That is the overarching theme that we see, whether there's productivity improvements. A lot of our large deals look at cost and so on, that's primarily the environment that we are in. Having said that, we are still seeing tremendous growth that I shared earlier in AI, which is absolutely new things that we are driving toward.

Okay. There's a question on deals and demand environment.

No, better. We see a few companies where we compete given our client base.

Those are the ones that we look at. Our sort of essential differentiator on AI that I shared earlier, but also on the quality of delivery and the depth of delivery, is massive and it's, at least in my view, very difficult for too many of any company to really match up with that.

Thank you, Yash. The next question is from Rukmini Rao from Fortune India.

Thanks, Rushik. Salil, given that if you're looking at Microsoft, which recently launched their Frontier company and then Anthropic, looking at Claude. With big tech getting into AI services space, are they going to be competitors where probably you and your peers may someday become just vendors giving in your engineers who, given that partnership that you have with many of them, where you're training lakhs of people on these models, right? Will Indian IT companies end up becoming subcontractors at the end of the day if these guys get into the game?

Two, if that happens, will that rob you from, say, the bigger opportunities that all of you have been talking about in the AI space that the massive opportunity that all of you think is going to be, but if the big boys get into this entire services space, is the future opportunity that you're talking about getting squeezed? Second one, in conjuncture with all the problems in terms of the cybersecurity part of these LLM models, right? When large corporations are looking at their own agentic environment, given your conversations with clients, are large companies okay to be under the umbrella of just one ecosystem, let's say just a cloud enterprise kind of adoption?

I mean, what happened with SaaS, given the problems that is with these LLMs, will there ever be an entire, let's say, Copilot environment in which any enterprise would be okay to work or just an OpenAI sort of environment, given the cybersecurity problems that are cropping up at very nascent stage of the adoption? Thank you. On the first one, I think if there are companies that want to enter the services space so that AI can be made to work, it is actually a huge positive for Infosys.

That means that what we do will continue to be done. That's what we do every day. Our job is to make AI work as services for clients. It now so happens that we have over 300,000 people doing that. We work with some 1,800 clients. The scale, the context that we have with our clients is completely different. To me, it's a huge positive. Of course, we have Happy to work with other companies, partner with them. That goes on in many different ways across time.

The first big thing for me is at least if someone new is entering services, means there's a very good future for services that they can see and therefore we can see. On the cyber, I think absolutely not just cyber, actually, the data part also. Many large companies and clients want to be mindful of how they look at what is happening with their own data or even beyond that, what is the essence of the company, how they're making sure it just doesn't go outside and they lose some of their competitive differentiation. One of the things we've done in Topaz Fabric is enable the large company client to keep that within themselves. It's not even with us in that sense on Topaz Fabric, is not with the foundation model company. That allows them to keep what is essential for them with themselves.

That to me is a huge differentiator for us and I think may become even more and more important as time goes on.

Salil, just to sort of clarify, when you say great opportunity, is it again, the whole subcontracting vendor kind of opportunity that you're talking about? Or virgin, probably big contracts that a Microsoft would end up winning if they are a AI services company, and you end up getting a chunk of it and everybody else goes about the same way now, and then vendor consolidation deal coming in about five years later. Is that what you say when you're saying that you're optimistic about the opportunity?

I'm more looking at it like if someone with a few hundred people or a few thousand people can get excited about services, we with 300,000 people will be very excited about services.

Is it people where probably what a Microsoft would be bidding for, you will also be able to bid for at a scale that they can do with their company?

My sense is like where we have a understanding of a client and the context of that client, I think we are extremely well-positioned in those places. I would say better than maybe anyone else.

Thank you. Thank you. With that, we come to the end of this press conference. We thank our friends from media. Thank you, Salil, and thank you, Jayesh. Before we conclude, please note that the archive webcast of this press conference will be available on the Infosys website and on our youtube channel later today. Thank you, and please join us for High Tea Outside.