While talking about the difficulty in a transforming culture of a company, Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, says, “The biggest challenge is ensuring that we transition ourselves to a new generation without losing our values, without losing our ethos.” This was shared by Sikka in a podcast discussion conducted at Knowledge @Wharton. 

When asked about how to transform the culture of an organization from that to becoming innovators.

He replied, “It is very, very tough. Everybody says it is tough, but when you do it in reality, when you exercise it, you realize that it is much more difficult than it seems.”

He also acknowledged the role played by co-founder N R Narayana Murthy in developing the culture of learning. He said, “The good news is that a culture of learning always helps. We had that — it comes from our founder. He used to talk about ‘learnability,’ the ability to learn, as one of the key hiring criteria.”

The comments come against the backdrop of a recent controversy, as reported in media, about alleged corporate governance lapses at the company. There was a tiff between Infosys board members and founders over the issue. 

Further talking about the role of Artificial Intelligence, he says,

“the work in AI is largely focused on the consumer world, and in some areas like robotics and autonomous driving. The enterprise world is wide open, rich with applications and so forth.”

He adds that dramatic growth that happened in the IT industry in the past 20 years is more mechanical than that, like infrastructure management or BPO [business process outsourcing], software verification

He alarmingly warns, “ If we sit still, there is absolutely no doubt that our jobs are going to be wiped out by AI — 60% to 70% over the next 10 years, or maybe less than 10 years, of the jobs that we do today are going to be replaced by AI unless we continue to evolve ourselves, unless we continue to develop better technology and faster automation.”

Vishal Sikka took charge as CEO of Infosys in 2014, which is one of the leading Information technology firms in India with annual revenues of $10 billion. 

(Source: The article is compiled out of Knowledge @Wharton podcast )