AI in Energy: Powering the Next Opportunity

Ashiss Dash, EVP & Segment Head, Infosys:

I just completed a major milestone in Infosys two weeks back. I had 30 years anniversary at Infosys. So I followed Dinesh. A short story, one of our founders name was also Dinesh. And Dinesh had joined five years before me. So whenever people would say Dinesh wants to see you, we would all go running and then we'll find this Dinesh, not the founder. He took full advantage of the first name. I run a business called SURE, Services, Utilities, Natural Resources and Energy globally. We have a market dominance in almost 12 different industry sectors that we work on. But energy and utilities has been a phenomenal journey for us. Just to give you a sense of where we are in the market, every industry rating out of 10 industry ratings that we attended last year, the IDCs, the Gartners, the Foresters, we were rated as leaders in every one of them. From a numbers perspective, we had a growth of 10.7% year on year in FY25. Compare that with our closest competition doing at 4.6, and industry average is about 1%. So we had10 times the industry average growth. And that's because the clients we have in the energy and utility sector, natural resources sector, they truly believe in us. They believe in the scale that we bring. Dinesh talked about a value system, they really believe that Infosys is transparent, Infosys invests in the right areas, and we are able to bring the global scale and visibility to them. Now, when I look at MRE, and thanks to Drew, Shane, and Mike, when we started talking, I felt that there is tremendous synergy in our value systems. We talk the same language, we feel the same way about our business, about our clients, and that's where I thought, this is going to be a big one for me to stand in front of the board and defend this. Dinesh may have had eight or nine acquisitions. This is my first love. So this is my first time, and I want to make sure that you get every single part of Infosys that is at your disposal that makes you successful, that helps you amplify. Because when you saw the video, I don't know if you recall, one of the things that really keeps people like me for three decades here is the purpose statement, right? To amplify human potential and create the next opportunity for people, businesses, and communities. I sit on the Infosys Foundation as a trustee in USA. We have re-skilled 13 million people across the globe on new technologies because we believe that this model of people stealing employees from each other to grow is really a… It's not going to scale. So we go and we have created this platform called Pathfinder and we've extended this to all the community colleges, underprivileged sections of different parts of the world, including right here in Houston, Oakland, Baltimore, multiple cities in the US. We train the teachers in communities colleges and schools who extended this platform to their students and 13 million people's lives have changed because of this. And That's just one example of what we do. From an overall energy perspective, where we are going is the grid is going to change forever. Demand for electricity is growing faster than any other energy source. In fact, electricity will be the future currency of all energy, whether it is home, energy demands, or transportation, or logistics, or even data centers that are energy hungry. For example, if you put a query on Perplexity or ChatGPT takes about 10 times the electricity that a Google search takes, which essentially means that demand is going to go up. And therefore, energy trading is going to be a central part of managing the grid. The complexity is going to increase. And the deep expertise that you bring and the scale we bring, I think this is a perfect combination for us. The other thing is Infosys is an organization that truly believes in AI. We are an AI-first organization. We do two kinds of AI projects. One, infusing AI into our offerings, which will include your offerings as well. So we'll bring our deep AI capabilities to see how all of you, when you talk to clients, can talk AI first. That's one of the things that we would like to do. The other is we do a lot of AI projects for our clients, close to 500 projects, to help clients navigate their AI journey. And there also, there are opportunities for all of you to participate and see how truly Infosys can be a leader in this changing landscape. With that, I just want to give you a commitment that the nation I have sponsors, but we have a great team. They will all be here for the success of this integration. Please feel free to reach out to any of us. We are all available. My email is the easiest one, dash@infosys.com. You cannot forget it. We are always there for any questions, anything you need. Let’s create, energize the future together. I am personally very excited, and you will see me a lot more times here. I know Joseph and Sriram may not like it, but I will certainly make sure that I take out time to come and spend with you. I am super excited. I want to make this a flagship asset for Infosys, and I hope with all of your support, we will have a great journey together. Thank you.