Indian IT professionals worried about 72-hour workweeks might soon face the opposite concern, as Bengaluru-based outsourcing giant Infosys has partnered with Anthropic to bring agentic AI to telecommunications companies and other regulated industries.
Anthropic and Infosys announced their collaboration plans on Tuesday, describing agentic AI as a core focus of their partnership. According to Infosys CEO Salil Parekh, the pair wants to combine their respective domain expertise to give businesses around the world a shot at actually getting some returns on their AI investments.
“Our collaboration with Anthropic marks a strategic leap toward advancing enterprise AI, enabling organizations to unlock value and become more intelligent, resilient, and responsible,” Parekh said in a canned statement.
The deal will primarily involve integrating Anthropic’s various Claude models and Claude Code with Infosys’ Topaz AI-powered business automation platform. According to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Infosys engineers are already using Claude Code for some work, and the partnership between the pair will enable the outsourcing giant to extend its footprint into regulated industries.
“There’s a big gap between an AI model that works in a demo and one that works in a regulated industry—and if you want to close that gap, you need domain expertise,” Amodei said. “Infosys has exactly that kind of expertise.”
Just add Claude, we suppose.
Can embracing AI save the IT consulting industry?
The particular domains that Anthropic and Infosys intend to enter via their partnership, and the tasks they intend their new AI agents to perform, hint that a headcount bloodbath is on the horizon.
In the telecommunications space, the pair wants to use AI agents to modernize network operations, manage customers across their lifecycle with a provider, and “improve service delivery,” whatever that might mean. In the financial services space, Anthropic and Infosys want AI to detect and assess risk, take care of compliance reports, and “deliver more personalized customer interactions,” including through tailoring financial advice to a client’s full account history and current market conditions.
The pair also wants Claude AI to help Infosys customers in the manufacturing and engineering spaces to speed up product design and simulation, and handle more code in software development. They also want AI to take on an increased enterprise operations role by automating routine work, “like document summarization, status reporting, and review cycles.” Sounds like shorthand for letting AI do a lot of what humans used to.
News that Infosys is leaning further into AI won’t come as a surprise to El Reg readers – we reported last month that India’s four largest outsourcing firms, including Infosys, had effectively slammed the brakes on hiring, even as they talked up productivity gains from increased use of AI in their operations.
Infosys, which does business in 59 countries around the world, has been leaning into AI just like its competitors, slashing roles across the company while simultaneously opening up more roles for AI experts to further their application of the technology.
Infosys shares have plunged to their lowest level in years recently as investors have soured on IT consultancy firms in the face of competition from AI firms like Anthropic. That said, the announcement did bump shares up more than 4 percent on Tuesday, so perhaps a little bubble-blowing magic can reverse the tide. ®