🔒Infosys is opening the door to a new age

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With the growing influence of robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, digital currencies, social media marketing and more, business models continue to change at a dizzying pace. Tech-savvy startups in virtually every industry are disrupting the status quo and companies around the world are scrambling to catch up, seeking ways to reinvent themselves and hold their own in an increasingly complex marketplace.

Enter Infosys, a global information technology company that offers next-generation digital services and consulting to clients across a broad range of industries. In May 2017, Infosys announced it would create 10,000 jobs across the U.S. and would set up six industry-specific innovation and training hubs in Indiana, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Hartford, Connecticut. The goal: to accelerate the pace of digital innovation in American business and industry. At least 1,000 jobs were earmarked for Connecticut.

Infosys President and Deputy Chief Operating Officer Ravi Kumar said when Infosys made that announcement, “people thought we were crazy, because hiring 10,000 new digital tech jobs was not going to be easy.” But he added, “we’ve already hired 9,100-plus across the country, and we are on track to get to the target which we’ve promised.”

In December, Infosys unveiled its $21 million Hartford Technology and Innovation Hub. Located on multiple floors of the Goodwin Square office tower at 225 Asylum Street, the facility already employs more than 300 people. “And interestingly, we are becoming a magnet for attracting talent from other New England states,” Kumar said. “Of the 300-plus, only about 100 are from Connecticut; 200 have actually come from the neighboring states” – strong evidence of in-migration to a state that has traditionally been concerned about the opposite.

Infosys made a conscious decision not to locate its hubs in centers where “ready-made digital technology talent” was already available, but instead to identify, recruit and train a whole new cohort of innovation-oriented employees. “We went to places where we could potentially build talent pools from schools and colleges, where there is a strong academic ecosystem,” said Kumar. “Connecticut has one of the best educational ecosystems in the United States. It’s under-tapped. It’s a hidden jewel. That was one of the things that attracted us to the state.”

The company also oriented the focus of each hub to the major types of clients it had in that area. In Connecticut, “our clients are primarily in healthcare, insurance and manufacturing, so that’s what we’re focusing on. In fact, downtown Hartford is an innovation hub for insurance and healthcare, and we want to contribute to that cause.”

The overarching decision to set up U.S. innovation hubs was based on the fact that “our own services were significantly shifting into new-age digital services from traditional tech services. And that shift required us to be building talent pools closer to our clients, and actually working with them in a co-creative way,” Kumar said.

“As we started that journey, we knew exactly how we would get there. We predicated it on hiring from schools, and we built from adjacent and legacy talent groups to create a talent pool. We hired STEM graduates and trained them in conjunction with universities, and we invested in a ‘finishing school’ infrastructure, as I call it – we offer 12 weeks of [onsite] training for undergrads. But as we progressed on that journey, we realized that our clients need an agile workspace which is immersed with technologies, and we wanted to then create these tech innovation hubs where our talent is hired from schools and trained by the universities in-house, and our large clients can co-create along with them.”

The state-of-the-art products and services being developed by Infosys are both accessible and demonstrably effective. In Hartford, visitors can visit living labs that showcase new-age solutions for business – from a system that offers ongoing analysis and “predictive maintenance” for manufacturing equipment to a solution that digitizes the life cycle of insurance. Kumar said most of the work that Infosys does for its large clients is focused on emerging technologies.

“The large enterprises locally, like insurance companies, are building digital systems of the future so they can service their customers better. Healthcare companies are building a massive digital infrastructure to support their customers. Manufacturers are digitizing their shop floors, installing machine-learning infrastructure so that they’re automated enough for high productivity. So digital technologies are being embraced by every industry – every industry is significantly paranoid about new-age companies which are coming in and disrupting their space.”

About 90% of the company’s clients also have global operations, “so a lot of times, what we build here is applied across the world.”

He said retail and banking are way ahead of the curve in terms of digitization, but some other industries have lagged behind, in large part because of an acute shortage of talent in their particular fields. But rather than focusing on “finding” the needed talent, Kumar said, Infosys is helping to create it.

While new technologies are making obsolete some jobs of the past, they are creating jobs of the future – albeit jobs that require new skill sets, abilities, and approaches. That has led to a skills gap, one that has been growing by the day, he said. “But we have this opportunity to bridge the gap and build the skills which are needed for these enterprises.”

To do so, Infosys has been thinking outside of the box – not only recruiting technology graduates but joining forces with liberal arts institutions like Hartford’s Trinity College to identify and hire arts students who can bring strong creative thinking skills to the table.

He said most new-age companies have one thing in common: they are skilled at addressing the “experience” gaps left by traditional companies, with virtual reality applications being just one example. To tap into that, Infosys chose the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) as its partner in that state, “and we now have at least six batches of physical designers who design experiences, who have actually gone through this program and become part of Infosys.”

The company has also been sourcing talent from community colleges. Explained Kumar, “We think the future of digital will blur the lines between blue-collar and white-collar jobs, and community colleges will play a very big role.”

He said 50% of students in the United States attend community colleges – a talent pool that has traditionally been underutilized by American corporations. “Technology can be a huge opportunity to bridge the gap rather than creating a divide.”

Making Connecticut home

The path that led Infosys to the Nutmeg State was paved with personal introductions, Kumar said. At the time that he was evaluating potential hub locations, he was already acquainted with now-Governor Ned Lamont. “Ned was a strong evangelist for me to come to Connecticut. He actually introduced me to the local government [officials, who] kindly showcased the state. Then, in partnership with the government, we also looked at the academic institutions and we spoke to the businesses in Hartford and Connecticut, and decided to set up our third hub here.”

Overall, Kumar feels that Hartford is an ideal location. In addition to Connecticut’s “world-class” education ecosystem, he said, the capital region and the state benefit from a close-knit and forward-thinking business community.

“It’s one of the few states where the businesses came together and actually put forward a strong case for us to be locally represented, and that was very appealing for us. Businesses can help support the effort to recruit new companies to the state, and Infosys was a great example of this. If we can service them as we have promised to service them, I think we can achieve our objectives pretty well,” he said.

“The academic partnerships, the business partnerships, and the appetite for the businesses to consume this digital technology and the talent we’ve built, it’s almost like making [solutions] locally for the businesses here, and making our hub a magnet for other states around it to be serviced. That’s what I, at least, am personally excited about.”

Meanwhile, Infosys is continuing to innovate as it moves forward. “We are pivoting the entire story of making Hartford the tech hub of the east coast. We are working with Trinity College, which is our national partner for liberal arts. Our first batch of data scientists are going to come out of Trinity College, so we have a training program where we hire liberal arts graduates across the United States, and we get them to Hartford.” The students are then trained in collaboration with the college’s faculty, “so they are hired not just from Trinity College but from all liberal arts schools in the U.S.”

Through its charitable foundation, Infosys Foundation USA, the company is also bringing K-12 schools into the mix. The foundation has provided grants for classroom technology and computer science training, reaching more than 3,700 students, 40-plus teachers and 30 schools in Connecticut to date.

It recently provided a grant to the Hispanic Heritage Foundation to create a comprehensive K-8 Spanish language computer science education pathway for Spanish English Language Learner students across the U.S., with pilot programs being launched in Hartford.

Kumar characterized his company’s innovation hub initiative to date as “a fascinating skills experiment. It’s a story of liberal arts, of community colleges, of going to K-12 schools, of repurposing talent from legacy talent pools and partnering with universities to create talent for the future.”

And new twists and turns seem to lie around every corner. “Our customers started asking us, ‘What about training our own employees?’ So we are now establishing a U.S. education center – it is going to be the largest corporate training university in the United States.” The 70-acre training facility will be located in Indianapolis.

Meanwhile, he said, the Hartford operation is having no trouble finding, attracting and retaining employees, and he sees it continuing to grow.

“You find graduates who have their homes in New Jersey, in Massachusetts, in New York, in Rhode Island, who are kind of liking to be in Connecticut, liking to be in Hartford, because it gives them the opportunity to work with Infosys,” he said.

“The draw is two-fold. First, every industry is going through a digital disruption, and they’re going to be in the midst of it, helping these large enterprises navigate that process. The second draw is the extraordinary opportunity of getting trained and re-skilled on a constant basis.”

In the new age, he said, society will move away from a mental framework of transitioning once from education to a career, and toward a continuum of lifelong learning. “The ones who will actually do well in the new digital age are those who can actually adapt to lifelong learning. ‘Learning to learn’ will become a virtue, and firms like Infosys, which are deeply rooted into training, will keep you equipped with new skills on a constant basis. These are two things that [students and employees] are fascinated about. These individuals are joining us because they love the training we give them, and they love the kind of work that they do.”