High Inflation environments to aid automation adoption: Infosys Edgeverve director

“Like Covid-19, one thing that comes to the aid is (enterprises) try to see what can be automated every time pressure builds and they look at potential cost savings,” said Sateesh Seetharamiah, global head of edge products and whole-time director at Edgeverve. “To that extent, it (inflation) can help us.”

He also said Edgeverve has significant headroom to scale the business. It caters to around 400 of Forbes Global 2,000 companies. The company deploys over 20,000 bots both internally and among clients. These are in areas such as claims processing, order bidding, and back-office operations.

“For example, our project with Phillips delivered millions of man hours of savings across their entire financial operations – from month-end closures and planning to collections processes,” Seetharamiah said. “As for British Telecom, we are helping them service their customers better – being able to save close to 70% of their average (customer) handling time. That means increased customer satisfaction while net promoter score goes up,” he added.

Edgeverve is the second largest contributor to Infosys’ overall profits among all subsidiaries as per annual report for 2021-22, second only to Infosys’ business process management (BPM) division. It had clocked Rs 3,005 crore in terms of annual turnover.

Global IT research firm Gartner has predicted that the market size for digital automation will touch around $600 billion in the ongoing fiscal year, a 35% annualised growth rate in five years.

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No pressure from Hyperscalers, banks
Infosys’ banking software Finacle is one of the business units under Edgeverve. Reacting to large US banks cutting down tech spending and growth tapering witnessed by hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, Seetharamiah said the banking software arm has not seen any change in spending or investment strategies from clients so far.

Edgeverve’s business will continue to grow as digitisation and automation is still core of business transformation despite potential “blips” seen among hyperscalers or banks, he added.

Earlier this month,
ET had reported that indications of spending cuts and increased credit loss provisioning by large US-based lenders and financial institutions may have a spill-over effect on Indian IT companies.