Bengaluru: Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally rewriting the grammar of software development, and writing code will no longer remain the central function of technology professionals, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani said on Tuesday.
Speaking at Infosys’ Investor Day, Nilekani said AI is being adopted at a pace faster than any previous technological transition — from the internet to smartphones — and is set to transform how businesses operate at a foundational level.
“Talent will have to deal with a world where writing code will not be the goal. It’ll actually be making AI work, orchestration, and those kinds of things,” he said. “Customer journeys, operating models, and mental models all have to change. Every enterprise must rethink how it operates.”
While traditional coding roles may diminish, Nilekani emphasised that new categories of jobs will emerge. He pointed to the growing demand for AI engineers, forward deployment engineers and forensic analysts — roles that did not exist just a few years ago — describing the talent transformation ahead as “huge”.
According to him, greenfield coding productivity is not the real challenge. The greater difficulty lies in managing trillions of dollars’ worth of legacy systems that have undocumented dependencies and accumulated technical debt.
Highlighting the unprecedented speed of AI adoption, Nilekani noted that the internet took more than a decade to reach one billion users and smartphones achieved that milestone in five years. AI, by contrast, is reaching similar scale in just a couple of years, enabled by infrastructure built during earlier technology cycles.
“Each technology transition has had implications, but this time, it’s a fundamental change in the way businesses operate. Customer journeys, operating models, talent — everything has to change,” he said.
He stressed that legacy system modernisation can no longer be postponed, citing high maintenance costs, siloed data and escalating security risks. Many large companies, he observed, spend between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of their information technology budgets on maintenance, which generates no direct business value.
“Accumulated tech debt over decades must be paid. You no longer have the option to defer this,” Nilekani said, adding that AI provides tools to modernise systems faster, more economically and at scale — although implementation remains complex.
He also underlined a shift in enterprise strategy — from buying packaged software to building AI-driven solutions. Companies are increasingly layering agentic AI interfaces onto existing systems to simplify customer journeys.
“Foundational systems will increasingly become systems of record, but the interface will be agentic,” he said.
Addressing the deployment gap between AI’s capabilities and enterprise execution, Nilekani emphasised the urgent need for talent transformation, change management and cleanup of technical debt.
“It’s not about using AI tools. It’s about productivity out of those tools. Otherwise, you’ll get false productivity,” he cautioned.
Concluding his remarks, Nilekani said enterprises must adopt first-principle thinking, agnostic system design and cross-firm collaboration to harness AI effectively.
“The opportunity is bigger than ever before, but the risk is in execution, not in the opportunity itself,” he said.
With PTI inputs