At a time when artificial intelligence is threatening to automate most tasks across the traditional IT services sector, Infosys, one of the biggest companies in India, has announced a partnership with Anthropic, an AI giant founded four years ago, but has the same market capitalisation as all the Indian IT companies combined.
The terms of the deal? The two companies are set to collaborate on AI. While Infosys will offer its expertise in client servicing, Anthropic will offer the technology through Claude, which will be automated into Infosys' Topaz ecosystem.
The two interfaces, in tandem, promise to automate complex business processes, accelerate software development and support governed AI adoption, the company confirmed in an exchange filing on Tuesday.
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However, what was interesting about the exchange filing was the keywords used by Infosys. The company did not shy away from mentioning that Claude will be used to 'testing', 'writing' and 'debugging' code.
"Teams will use Claude Code to write, test, and debug code – helping developers move faster from design through production," Infosys said in the exchange filing.
For an AI startup like Anthropic, home to about 3,000 employees, this is not a particular highlight. However, for Infosys, with a headcount of around 3.37 lakh, a significant pool of which. To put things into perspective, the number of graduates hired by Infosys is six times the size of Anthropic's full workforce.
These are entry-level graduates or junior roles that often revolve around routine application development, quality assurance, bug fixing and system maintenance. In other words, these are the kinds of repeatable, rules-based tasks that generative AI-coding tools are improving rapidly, with Claude CoWork being an ideal case in point.
Brokerages On IT Jobs
It is hard to quantify what this means for Infosys in terms of its workforce, but brokerages have indicated that the dynamics of the IT workforce will change going forward due to the advent of AI.
According to Nomura, IT jobs won't vanish, but there may be more AI-assisted workflows, while demand for low-end coding will significantly fall. UBS, meanwhile, firms that adapt to agentic workflows may expand high-end roles.
MeitY Secretary S. Krishna, meanwhile, believes overall employment in the IT sector is unlikely to decline even amid AI adoption. He quoted a recent Niti Aayog study that says AI will create an additional 4 million jobs.
READ MORE: Infosys Signs Pact With Anthropic To Collaborate On AI Using Claude
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