Unleashing a New Energy: The Infosys-MRE Fusion
Insights
- The energy sector is rapidly shifting from fossil-based systems to intelligent, AI-powered operations, requiring domain-specific solutions that span asset optimization, data insights, and role-based copilots.
- The Infosys–MRE Consulting partnership unlocks a powerful combination: MRE’s deep domain knowledge in energy trading and risk management, and Infosys’ global scale and delivery capabilities.
- Energy companies must evolve beyond legacy systems, as rising demand and the global energy transition create urgent opportunities for AI-first, data-driven transformation at scale.
In this expert panel, David Wagner (Infosys Consulting), Tommy Miles (MRE Consulting), and Sriram Sundar (Infosys) explore how AI is transforming the energy industry. Learn how the Infosys SURE AI framework—featuring asset.ai, insights.ai, and persona.ai—is driving asset optimization, operational efficiency, and smarter decision-making. The panel also covers leadership insights, digital transformation strategies, and how the Infosys–MRE partnership is unlocking new value in energy trading and risk management.
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Sriram Sundar:
Let me start with you, David. Can you tell us about your journey in Infosys? How was it? What have you learned? You have spent, what, 23, 24 years now with the company?
David Wagner:
Not quite. You're not that far? Okay. No, I'm only 20, a little over 20 years in the company right now. So I actually, I'll go, I'll predate the company. I started in what was then the Big Six and then I got to a small boutique company and then I joined Infosys. And it's been an amazing 20 years and I'm looking forward to the next, by the way, I started in management consulting when I was nine years old. That's the little known fact about me. So if you're trying to add up how long I've been doing this stuff. A wonderful journey throughout, I started actually using our current titles. started as a principal, which is the equivalent of a manager, and progressed. I started my entire accountability back then was I was responsible for a $120,000 project. That's where I started. Grew up in the firm, became a partner, became the head of the energy practice for consulting North America, then the head of the SURE practice for North America for consulting, and then the global head and have had various other titles. That's been my journey. It's really hard to compress 20 years of learning, but as you've heard about this fantastic organization Infosys, the ability of our firm to deliver global engagements and what I've had to learn is how to harness that, how to leverage that, how to bring that to our clients as effectively as possible to really drive value for our clients, bringing the whole 300,000 person horsepower of the firm.
Sriram Sundar:
Is there any story that stands out for you in terms of the Infosys value system that Dinesh spoke about? I know you have a fantastic story.
David Wagner:
I, there are, the problem with me is I have too many stories and they all take too long. But one of my favorite ones that happened early in my career here, for, I have been in Houston, or I was, lived in Houston for 28 years, I actually moved to Austin two years ago for family reasons, but I was in Houston for 28 years. And for those of you were here back in 2005, there was a few hurricanes in the United States that year, starting, actually starting back with Dennis, but then there was Katrina, which was on the news every day, and shortly after Katrina, there was a cat five headed for Houston called Rita. And the three million residents of Houston decided to evacuate on the same day at the same time. Hopefully none of you were caught up in that, but for anyone who was caught up in that, I had a team of people, I was living in The Woodlands, so I fortunately had a little bit of distance, but I had a team of people living in the energy corridor, and who left their house Thursday at 3 a.m., and as it was around 5 p.m. and I was on the phone with one of them, they'd gotten up to near the woodlands. So 14 hours later, they'd made my normal 45-minute commute. Around that time is when Infosys made the decision, we, not I, but Infosys decided they would rent a jet, lease a jet. And so my entire team, along with several other hundred people from Infosys who were stuck in the traffic jam trying to escape Houston, turned around in 15, 20 minutes. They were at Intercontinental Airport on the leased jet. Now that's a nice story that the company did that for our people. But the thing that really kind of, sometimes I get choked up when I tell the story. Those people at that time, again, anyone who's caught up in it, you couldn't get a hotel room anywhere north of town. They were all fully booked. The Dallas Office of Infosys showed up at the airport and met the Houston office and took people into their homes. And that was a, I mean, if you want talk about living your values, that was the individuals and the corporate doing it.
Sriram Sundar:
He told me this story. I was at Austin at that time. We received some families as well from Houston at that time. But the way he was telling that story, I said, you have to tell the story on the stage, right? So that people get to understand what Infosys is, what we stand for. And when we say we are employee first, what we mean by that. We really mean that, right? Tommy, this is a question for you. So how has your journey with MRE has been? And how have you created client impact in the market for customers and what have you done for the employees as well?
Tommy Miles:
Yeah, so my journey actually started off, if you recall, Shane talking about a software product that we almost became. I was a user of that as an accountant at our founding client. And I opened Excel and GasTrack. So that was the first two things I opened every day. And so I actually got to see the MRE values from the client perspective and got really interested and excited in getting out of accounting. No offense to any accountants in the room. But I wanted something more rewarding and exciting. And so jumped ship, came over and joined MRE in 2004, started off as a junior developer and worked my way up to technical architects and solution architects focused on the energy side. I think what's interesting about our journey is as we made that pivot away from a software company, we spent really about the first 20 years as a firm focused specifically in energy and more specifically in the ETRM and CTRM focus. But then as we saw what normally happens with these products, they don't evolve as quick as the market. We looked at other opportunities to bring in things like Salesforce and bring in data scientists and bring in data solutions to be able to really complement an overall offering to our clients that creates value along the entire life cycle of their needs. And so that evolution away from just a energy focused company into a more broad capability for our clients I think has given us the ability to navigate some of the ups and downs that Shane's talked about. And then our people, I mean you can see them all in front of us, they are wonderful, they're hard working, they're collaborative. They have an entrepreneurial mindset, and we really are a company that values our people first and our clients as well. And so that's something that's kept most of our people here. If you've been at MRE more than 10 years, raise your hand. If you've been at, yeah, that's exciting. We like to tell our clients, especially in our division, that our average tenure, that graying of the CTRM industry that Shane talked about, our average tenure is 10 plus years. And most of our people have either been at MRE or in the industry for 15 to 20 years. And so that gives us a deep domain knowledge that we can really take to our clients and differentiate from others.
Sriram Sundar:
Just a curious question, I know a lot of Infosys guys are also here. How many of you have been with Infosys for more than 10 years? 20 years? And there are two 30 years people in the first row. Fantastic. So this is a question Tommy, all three of us will go around and answer, but maybe I'll start with you, David first, and then come to Tommy. How do you see this partnership coming through in the future? So what are your hopes for this partnership in the future? Where do you see this going?
David Wagner:
So my hopes are that we are gonna see a tremendous value for all dimensions. We're gonna see tremendous value for our clients. We're gonna see tremendous value for the firm. We're gonna see tremendous value for the people, right? And so what does that look like? What that looks like for everyone in this room is the ability to really define your own destiny and grow. And that was sort of part of my own career path here, was spotting a white space and then developing my own practice around it and growing that and taking it off. You know, I would hope that in the future we would never be able to hold an event like this again in this space. You know, we're going to have to rent out, I guess that, I don't even know where the rockets play anymore. Toyota Center, sorry. But yeah, I see us really redefining this space and dominating energy training risk management, the associated Salesforce capabilities that… I'd rather call us we as opposed to you and us… but that we are gonna develop and the ability to really help our clients solve some of their problems at scale. I think it was Shane who talked about, and we talked about this over the months, there was a $200 million program BP was putting out for bid a couple years ago and, MRE had the expertise, Infosys had the scale, neither one of us could actually bid on it. Tomorrow we could. And those are some exciting programs. So that's the future.
Sriram Sundar:
Wonderful answer. Tommy?
Tommy Miles:
Yeah, I think just to build on that as you heard from Dash, we've been looking at the industry evolving dramatically in the next 10 to 15 years. Our personal individual consumption of electricity and generation is going to be through the roof. The reliance on coal and other products is going down and so the market is going to move really fast. And it's going to be a global problem, not a local problem. And so being able to capitalize on that energy transition and being a leading firm in that I think is going to be an opportunity to really help shape what the future looks like. And then for us, as Todd and I have looked at the division over the last few years, we haven't had the opportunity to focus in on some of the artificial intelligence, some of the data science and data analytics. We've just started that journey. And so being able to… what was it? Warp speed along the path from where we are today to where we are collectively. That is something that I see we can take to our clients immediately and really help shape the energy industry and how they think about that. And as you know, from working in this industry for 20ish years, they don't think about technology very well, right? They think about how do I get product from generation or production to market. And so we can really shape what the future of energy management trading and risk looks like through our knowledge and collective deep domain experience in AI and in this industry. And so that's exciting to me because we could be at the foundation of what the future of energy looks like.
Yeah, I think just to build on that as you heard from Dash, we've been looking at the industry evolving dramatically in the next 10 to 15 years. Our personal individual consumption of electricity and generation is going to be through the roof. The reliance on coal and other products is going down and so the market is going to move really fast. And it's going to be a global problem, not a local problem. And so being able to capitalize on that energy transition and being a leading firm in that I think is going to be an opportunity to really help shape what the future looks like. And then for us, as Todd and I have looked at the division over the last few years, we haven't had the opportunity to focus in on some of the artificial intelligence, some of the data science and data analytics. We've just started that journey. And so being able to… what was it? Warp speed along the path from where we are today to where we are collectively. That is something that I see we can take to our clients immediately and really help shape the energy industry and how they think about that. And as you know, from working in this industry for 20ish years, they don't think about technology very well, right? They think about how do I get product from generation or production to market. And so we can really shape what the future of energy management trading and risk looks like through our knowledge and collective deep domain experience in AI and in this industry. And so that's exciting to me because we could be at the foundation of what the future of energy looks like.
Sriram Sundar:
Sure, fantastic. See, personally, I see we are really big in BP. Joseph and team have done a fantastic job, and now it's probably one of our top five accounts, not just in the SURE vertical of Dash, top five accounts in Infosys, right, as a company. We are a $20 billion company. BP is a pretty large account for us. You guys are very big in Shell. You have a lot of employees working for Shell as well. Where I see the potential is the ExxonMobil, the Chevrons, the ConocoPhillips. Everybody else who doing the trading. We are very big on those clients, right? So for me personally from the North America markets, that's a really, really exciting space for me to get into. We have had inquiries already from Chevron, from ExxonMobil, from Enbridge, clients like that who have said that, okay, we saw this news, we have published this on LinkedIn. Sandeep, who is our head of sales, he got five queries within a span of 24 hours. That's how the market is excited about. And I go back to the point that Shane mentioned, CTRM at scale. Our challenge is how we are going to figure out how we are going to scale this faster with the global delivery model also coming in place. And that's going to reduce the TCO for our customers. Our customers are telling us openly that they're not very happy with Accenture and Publicis Sapient who are our main competition in this space. This is a chance for us to actually go into that space and start disrupting the market. So it's a phenomenal space for us to actually go and capture a significant amount of market share. And we have the accounts. You have the depth of experience. Let's bring it together. Let me move on to a lighter note. For both of you, I'm not going to answer this, okay? Now I'm becoming a moderator. So what would you tell your 20-year-old self to do differently?
Tommy Miles:
Oh no, so are we talking personally or professionally? I think there was a note to keep it professionally. You could throw in something spicier there. You know, I think, I don't say this lightly because it can come across a little arrogant, but I don't know that I would do anything very differently. I think... I started off in a nonprofit. It's exciting to hear about the investment there. I started off as an accountant. I was following in the tradition of my mother who was an accountant. I saw she literally would come home on the evenings with tea accounts. And if anyone doesn't know, accounting used to be manual. And there were these big giant ledgers that people would go and write all the things in. I watched that. And I loved mathematics. And I was like, great, math and accounting. Those don't work together very well. So I think that that gave me a foundation though for understanding a lot about the industry and you know being on the downstream side of the process you get to see all the things that don't work well. And so that gave me a good foundation and understanding what our client needs are. And then coming to MRE as a developer… Keith Ferris my first day on the job at MRE gets up on a whiteboard and starts drawing swim lanes and all these other I have no idea what he's talking about. I'm just like, I wrote Excel VBA macros, I don't know how to do this. But I immediately learned that the people at MRE were really invested in making me successful. And so, I think that was a good opportunity for me to jump over. I don't think any other firm would have been good for me. And so I don't, I'm sure there's some things I probably shouldn't have done. Vicki was with me when I was younger, so there's probably sometimes I showed up a little, you know, maybe not appropriate for work. But other than that, think my journey has been good.
Sriram Sundar:
OK. You gave us enough there. Thank you. How about you David?
David Wagner:
So I think I'll contrast because I don't have enough time to tell you what I would tell my 20-year-old self, except I would not even waste my breath because my 20-year-old self knew it all and wouldn't have listened. So I would need to go to my 30-year-old self and try that to see if I could impart a little bit of wisdom. For those of you who don't know any Hindi, I'll teach you the first word that I learned in Hindi that's gyaan. And gyaan, there we go, gyaan means wisdom. So I try to share a little gyaan with my 30-year-old self. And so what's that that I would try to share? So recognize that, especially in this industry, everyone you're working with is actually really smart. And if you think that someone is an idiot or is crazy, which I was like, this guy's crazy, this guy's an idiot, there's something you don't know. They either know something you don't know or they're incented in a way that you don't understand. And so what they're doing is perfectly rational based upon their knowledge and their metrics. And actually, if you can understand what's driving their behavior, you have a much better chance of changing it rather than just trying to continue to argue with them and think that they're stupid, which my 30-year-old self seemed to think a lot of people were. You've grown up and matured. I hopefully have matured.
Sriram Sundar:
Wonderful. No, thanks David. See one of the things I think Shane was talking about. I think Drew was also talking about a little bit is how AI is going to impact every industry. We are all worried about what's the impact going to be. We are working at the pioneers of that technology as Infosys within SURE. We have, as you come along, as you start working with us, we have a dedicated SURE AI Council. We approach AI across two dimensions. We approach AI through what we call as client.ai or business.ai, where we take specific use cases for various domain scenarios. So for example, in the ETRM context, if you have to automate ETRM operations, how would you do it? How will you do deal validation? How will you do reconciliation? Things like that. We have already started thinking about use cases like that. And... So that is one type of operations optimization that we are working on for our customers. This we take to any of our managed services customers. And all the big names I mentioned, each one of them are big managed services customers with us, right? So each one of them is a near $100 million per year account for us. And we do a significant amount of AI ops and optimization work with them. Then we also focus on something called as client.ai. We look at it across three prisms in the SURE segment. I call it as asset.ai where we are working on things like asset optimization, optimization of your production, optimization of your drilling processes, things like that. The second one is what I call as insights.ai. Most of these oil and gas companies have phenomenal amount of data. So how can you aggregate all this data and extract meaningful insights out of it? And how do you apply AI to that, right? And LLMs to that and extract meaningful insights to make decisions faster and better. The third dimension is where a lot of ETRM and all our works could be amplified. It's called persona.ai. Where for, how can you build a co-pilot or assistant for every persona that you have in a workflow? Whether it is a trading desk analyst, whether it is a petro technician, a geologist, a geophysicist, across every one of our oil and gas value chain activities, how can you create a co-pilot? Our teams are actually working on use cases on each of these dimensions I spoke about across the three prisms: asset.ai, insights.ai, and persona.ai. So now, with Infosys, for the MRE team, you have access to all this as well. So please reach out to our teams. Kiran is going to be there working with Joseph as we move forward. Reach out to our sales teams. Please get to know the client partners of each of the accounts. We have client partners for every large account of Infosys. Please reach out to them so that you can collaborate with them and take these ideas to the market and take to your clients as well. Ultimately, our success is going to be defined by how well we do in this market. And we need to get some quick wins under our belt. That will drive the momentum forward for us. I'd like to thank my panelists for joining me on stage. And back to you, Maria. Thank you, everyone.
