March 20, 2025
Rafee Tarafdar – CTO – Infosys
How Infosys is Rebooting AI Innovation For What’s Next In Business – Rafee Tarafdar, CTO Infosys
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The vast ocean of AI has become challenging for some companies, while being THE driving force in other organizations innovation strategies across sectors. You could call it an Innovation Crisis. The world’s top companies and governments need better partners who can help them navigate these choppy waters and seize the growth opportunities ahead. In some sectors—it is going to be eat or be eaten.
To provide some insider knowledge on how major players are approaching these opportunities, tech. guru and Infosys Chief Technology Officer, Rafee Tarafdar , joins this episode of The Reboot Chronicles. With 300,000 employees operating in 56 countries and over $19B in revenue, Infosys is a titan in digital transformation, AI deployment and other critical growth-path platform development.
Watch or listen as Rafee unpacks the challenges of bringing AI to scale, lessons for businesses and CEOs, how Infosys faced those issues by doing it in-house first, and how many of the world’s largest companies are becoming AI-first businesses.
Becoming An AI-First Enterprise
While many companies are just now jumping on the AI boat, Infosys has been navigating the AI ocean for years, and in 2022 it launched its AI-first initiative. Rafee noted that in 2022 “ we looked at the potential of what it [AI] could do, we saw that this could have a significant impact on our business.” Rafee recognized this when the GPT-2 model was around the corner, and had the foresight to recognize that in its current form there was potential, and if it got stronger it could change everything. Luckily for him and Infosys it has exploded in growth.
The process of becoming an AI-first company meant a lot of internal restructuring, and integrating AI into existing systems so they could then grow from there. All of the solutions that they would later bring to their customers came from in-house first, Rafee even says “everything we tell our customers we’ll do at Infosys first. So we’ll eat our own dog food.” This has gained them a huge amount of trust in the industry, as the clients they are working with have the perfect example to base their decisions off of.
AI, Robotics, And The Future Of Work
One exciting frontier Rafee sees is the melding of AI and robotics. He explains that while autonomous machines and LIDAR-based navigation have been around for some time, the linguistic capabilities of generative AI are making human-machine interactions far more meaningful. This shift is showing the way for AI-powered humanoid assistants and digital twins to simulate real-world conditions, that allow for better testing and data for manufacturing, logistics, and beyond
Rebooting The Future Of AI In Business
Looking ahead, Rafee believes AI’s true potential lies in changing business processes, not just automating them. While cost savings and efficiency improvements have been the initial focus, that is just the “Low hanging fruit”. The real impact will come from AI-powered growth plans, new business models, and industry-wide innovation.
His advice to CEOs is to think beyond short-term gains and invest in long-term AI transformation. The technology is evolving rapidly, every 4 months it seems like there is some new tech that everyone is jumping on. The companies that experiment, adapt, and scale AI wisely will be the leaders of tomorrow. Your going to need a bigger boat!
