Videos
Infosys on Exponential Engineering, Frontier Telco, and AI-Native Transformation
Insights
- Agentic AI is helping telecom operators break down data and process silos to drive operational efficiency and business impact.
- Exponential engineering introduces a new operating model built around humans and agents working together through orchestrated workflows.
- Legacy modernization is emerging as one of the most valuable applications of AI, enabling large-scale transformation that was previously difficult to justify economically.
At MWC 2026, Sachin Arora of Infosys discusses how telecom leaders are using AI to address slowing revenue growth, rising costs, and the need for new sources of differentiation. He explains how agentic AI creates pathways to business impact by connecting fragmented data, processes, and systems across the enterprise. The conversation introduces the concept of exponential engineering, which combines domain expertise with AI-driven intelligence to transform how software is built, operations are managed, and business outcomes are delivered. Arora also describes how the Frontier Telco vision reimagines telecom as an AI-native organization where humans and agents collaborate to drive productivity, accelerate modernization, and unlock new growth opportunities. Looking ahead, he expects the industry to move beyond pilots and prototypes toward industrial-scale deployments that transform legacy estates, operating models, and business performance.
Sachin Arora:
So the conversations over the last couple of days have ranged from lack of revenue growth or higher costs, right? There's so many new challenges that are emerging. How do you drive growth in a very saturated B2C market? How do you solve for B2B differentiation? To do that, intelligence is now available everywhere. Software stacks mean that data is siloed, processes are siloed. Agentic AI offers that opportunity to unlock this. The conversations I've been having have been all about creating those pathways that lead to impact to telco.
Sachin Arora:
How do you solve for sovereign data center opportunity? Exponential engineering is the intersection of domain engineering and intelligence, and that's where the ROI of AI comes into play. A very obvious impact area is cost and operation efficiencies. But then it's also about driving marketing, shared services functions. It's about solving for sovereignty, capturing newer areas of growth. AI data centers is a classic example.
Sachin Arora:
How does exponential engineering change the model today?
Sachin Arora:
Exponential engineering at its very core is a fundamentally very different operating construct. You move from humans to humans and agents. You move from humans doing work to agentic workflows orchestrating work, and done in that way the cost of change, it solves for all the enterprise governance, the process friction, the ways of working, and that is helping enterprise unlock the promise of AI.
Sachin Arora:
So Sachin, how does this fit together with the Frontier Telco?
Sachin Arora:
Frontier Telco is the promise of forward-looking agentic AI native telco, which at the very heart of it is humans and agents. It's redefinition of the production model. It's looking at the AI stack and looking at how do you engage with customers and generate insights in a very different way. Exponential engineering is the way you bring Frontier Telco to reality.
Sachin Arora:
So one thing that we've seen in all the conversations right now is intelligence is available. All clients have adopted various forms of intelligence providers. Software productivity is a very low hanging fruit, but the real challenge lies in industrialising it. How do you look at it not just as a tool, but something that changes the way software gets built, the way capabilities are engineered? And one area of application has been legacy modernization. It takes a lot longer and costs a lot more, making some of these legacy cases unviable and unfeasible. Exponential engineering allows enterprises to solve for legacy modernization at scale.
Sachin Arora:
The CEOs are looking at driving the P&L, the chief operating officers are looking at operational efficiency, unit cost economics, while the chief information officers have looked at, can I industrialize it across my entire technology capability? Very interestingly, one key stakeholder group, chief technology officer, engineering growth, they are the first ones to adopt it and raise it, because you're building an engineering core that powers the transformation for the future.
Sachin Arora:
I'd love to be here next year and talk about some industrialized cases where telcos have been able to solve legacy modernization at scale. We're no longer talking about pilots and prototypes. We're talking about solving for millions of lines of code. We're talking about doing integration. We're talking about country operating models coming to fruition. P&L transforming because they have seen the impact of exponential engineering.
