A very good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us today at our fourth quarter financial results. My name is Rishi, and on behalf of Infosys, I'd like to welcome all of you.

Once again, apologies for the delay. As always, we request one question from each media house, but I know we are delayed so we may accommodate a little more.

We don't know. With that, let me invite our Chief Executive Officer, Mr.

Salil Parekh, for his opening remarks. Over to you, Salil.

Thanks, Rishi, and thank you all for being here. Sorry we are late.

We delivered a strong performance in financial year 2026. We had growth of 3.1% for the full year in constant currency terms.

On Q4, our growth year on year was 4.1% in constant currency terms. We had strong growth in financial services, in communications, in manufacturing from the industry side, and Europe in the geography side.

Large deals were very good, $14.9 billion for the full year, $3.2 billion for the fourth quarter. The full year was 28% larger than it was the previous year.

We shared our AI strategy during the AI Investor Day a few weeks ago. We see a large addressable market for AI services across the six areas that we mentioned: AI strategy engineering, data, process, legacy modernization, physical AI, and trust.

With our Topaz fabric platform for AI and our Cobalt platform for cloud, we have differentiated capabilities, the capabilities that are operational today and that are working with our clients across each of these six areas of the AI landscape. As we look ahead to the financial year 2027, we see large opportunities in AI services.

We also see continued competitive intensity, and we see an AI productivity impact, a combination of these things. With a clear AI strategic roadmap and a real-world toolkit of Topaz fabric, we are well positioned to support our clients' transformation, technology, and operations objectives.

Our revenue growth guidance for the financial year 2027 is 1.5% to 3.5% growth year on year in constant currency terms. We expect acceleration of growth in financial services and in energy, utility, resources, and services vertical.

Our operating margin guidance for financial year '27 is 20% to 22%. With that, let's open it up for questions.

Thank you, Salil. Joining Salil is Mr.

Jayesh Sanghrajka, Chief Financial Officer, Infosys. The first question is from Ritu Singh from CNBC-TV18.

Hi, Salil. Hi, Jayesh.

Salil, first, on your guidance itself, 1.5% to 3.5%, if you could break up for us, there are a bunch of acquisitions you've made at the end of the quarter. By when do you expect them to close?

Will it be sometime during the course of FY, and if yes, how much of that is baked into these numbers? Especially on the discretionary spend environment, because we've heard from your peers like HCLTech, for instance, talking about how there were two large US telecom clients that had cut down on spends, there were cancellations of two SAP projects, and so on.

Wipro again giving a similar sort of commentary. What are you seeing from your clients in some of the verticals you'd highlighted the last time that were seeing weakness?

What sort of guidance you have there? Secondly, on your margin, 21%, if you could break up for us how much was the tailwind from currency, etc., what portion have you reinvested, what the philosophy there is?

Jayesh, 20,000 was the figure you gave us for hiring for the last fiscal. What's the plan for this year?

What are the wage hikes that you've planned, and the time period for that? Salil, if I may, there's been some speculation about your tenure here at Infosys, your current term ends in March next year.

Has there been a discussion at the board level about a potential extension? Would you wish to continue for a full term?

What's been the talks around that?

Let me start with the industry view on the guidance of the revenue. Jayesh will give a little bit of the color with that acquisition what you mentioned, the way we have made the guidance, and some other market outlook.

What we're seeing right now is financial services, we are seeing in an acceleration of our growth next year. We had growth in financial year '26, we're seeing more growth.

In energy, utilities, services, resources vertical, similar, good, more growth there. What we are seeing in terms of projects, we see that at the AI Investor Day we shared that our AI services revenue was growing nicely.

We see on the large deals the net new is pretty large for the full year at 55%. That gives us support for growth.

We see the compression that we mentioned in that AI Investor Day and earlier just now as a combination. We are not seeing something that has unusually changed from that last quarter to this quarter.

In the sense these are the scenarios we were seeing, it's not either become more or less. It's that sort of a scenario: good growth on those industries I mentioned, good growth in the AI and compression, and there's competitive intensity.

All that put together with a little bit of a color on the acquisition is where the guidance comes out. Then on margin also Jayesh will give some view.

On the—

On [AI, your revenue?] ?

Yeah. On AI, for instance, you told us in your investor briefing that 5.5% of the revenue in the third quarter came in from AI.

The total addressable market is about $300 to $400 billion. In the fourth quarter, is there a number you could provide us, annualized, what is the number you see, if there's more clarity you could give us?

Or what market share do you target from this $400 billion figure?

We are targeting a very good market share from that number which was for 2030, what we had given, the addressable market from an external study. The growth in AI services is very strong, but we have not disclosed that revenue number externally.

5.5% worked out to about 2,500 crores in the third quarter. Is this roughly the number?

5.5% is that, yeah.

Was it similar in the fourth quarter, higher?

No, it's growing. It's much much more growth, but we're not giving the number, but it's growing very nicely.

It's higher than 5.5%?

Yeah.

Okay. If you could also comment on your tenure as well?

I'll let Jayesh answer the other questions.

If you look at the revenue guidance, and I'll just maybe come back to the Q1, full year revenue numbers. The 3.1% growth was after absorbing lower third-party related revenue, which was 1 1%, and the lower on-site mix, which was 70 basis points.

We should look at the revenue numbers in that context. Both of that impacted the revenue from the overall revenue growth perspective.

In terms of the guidance for the next year, we had three acquisitions, or two two acquisitions and a JV that we announced last year. The acquisitions with an insurance company, which is Stratas, which is already closed, and it's baked into the guidance.

What is baked into the guidance is approximately 25 basis points or a quarter quarter point of the guidance. The other acquisition was Optimum, which is not baked in because we have not closed it yet.

We are still awaiting certain regulatory approvals, and once that is closed is when we'll bake in. The third one is the JV with an Australian client of ours, which is also pending regulatory approvals right now, we have not baked in both of that in the guidance at this point in time.

Sorry, only Optimum is 25 basis points?

The Stratas is 25 basis points at this point in time.

The margin breakup and the hiring plans?

If you look at the margins, the full-year margin is at 21%, the quarterly margin is also 20.9%, very close to 21%. If you look at the puts and takes of the margin walk from the last quarter, we got 50 basis points impact from an acquisition-related amortization that we absorbed.

There was a 30 basis points of one-off benefit that we got Q3, so, when you compare, that's a headwind, and 20 basis points on account of comp-related matters. That was partially offset by 40 basis points of currency benefit, and 30 basis points came from our Maximus performance.

Thank you. I think question on tenure.

Yeah. The last question was hiring.

The last year, we had announced 20,000 for FY26, and we have hired more than 20,000 freshers from the market. This year also, we are expecting at least 20,000 freshers to be hired.

On the tenure, I think, Salil?

No comment

on that.

Right. Thank you, Ritu.

We'll now move to Mansee Dave from ET Now.

Good evening, Salil and Jayesh. Pleasure talking to you.

My first question is on the margin sustainability. The margins have remained resilient despite multiple headwinds.

What gives you confidence in sustaining the same going forward? The next question would be on the global uncertainties which we have seen these days.

Global uncertainties like the geopolitical tensions and cautious client spending, let's say. What early signals are you seeing for FY27?

Do you expect the growth to acceleration or another year of consolidation moving ahead? Thank you.

Let me start on the margin. Jayesh will have much more color.

I think some time ago Jayesh started the program on the margin expansion or margin protection, and that is one of the main reasons why the company has been able to remain resilient on the margins. We have been fairly consistent across the last number of years.

The program is very strong, it's being executed well. We will continue to see there are also great pressures, but we are confident with the guidance that we have given this year for the margin between 20% and 22%.

Then Jayesh will give a little bit more color, but on that environment what you asked, I think what we're seeing there is at the start of this year we were starting to see the start of the calendar year, we were starting to see the global environment, the growth, especially in our strong markets, looking good, and even in the markets where we are now making a bigger movement, for example, Japan and all was growing quite nicely. Now with the situation with the Iran war, there was a change in the economic environment.

Now from what we are seeing, there seems to be paths towards things stabilizing. We hope everyone sort of gets there.

From then what we understand just talking to people in the market and the clients is that the underlying resilience of some of the economies where we have the big markets is pretty good. The economies are doing well, there's good investments, AI is growing well, and we have a good strategic approach on AI services.

My sense is that will definitely help, but we'll see how it plays out. We've given the guidance of the growth based on what we are seeing today.

We'll see whether some of this comes true or some of this changes as the year goes.

If you look at the margin program, and like Salil was saying, I think it's done well. In the first year, we expanded margins by 50 basis points.

This year, while we have maintained margins at 21%, I think we have absorbed a lot of headwinds, and we have also invested a lot in the business, right? Our sales and marketing costs has, for instance, gone up by 40 basis points.

We have invested in all the AI-related capabilities and the AI partnerships. We have invested in talent.

I think we have absorbed all of those and delivered 21% margin. That is what gives us confidence of way forward.

At the same time, there are going to be headwinds, right? There is competitiveness in the market, there is acquisition that we have done, the acquisition-related cost will impact margins by another 60 to 70 basis points.

Those are headwinds that we will have to absorb while we talk about the margin program. Our endeavor is to improve margins on a medium- to long-term period, but this year we are confident of delivering 20% to 22%.

Thank you. The next question is from Chandra Srikanth from Moneycontrol.

Hi, Salil. Hi, Jayesh.

Salil, you mentioned BFSI and energy and utilities a couple of times. Just wanted to understand what is giving you so much of confidence there?

As Ritu pointed out, some of your peers have spoken about client-specific issues and how discretionary spends continue to be a challenge. What is working for you in terms of the normal business as well as AI business?

AI also, because you mentioned last time that it's now 5% of revenues for you, if you can give us a sense of where things stand now, it'll be really useful. In terms of acquisitions, do you see opportunities in AI startups?

Is that something that you will look at? How do you see Mythos impacting your business, if you can give us some color on that?

Jayesh, some details on the wage hikes for this year, how you're thinking about it. I think after five, six quarters, we've seen employee count actually declined by over 8,000.

Why have the number of employees declined? Thanks.

Let me start on the financial services and that sort of environment what you mentioned. What we're seeing is, and some of this we shared in that AI Investor Day, if you look at all of our industry groups with our largest clients, we are already the AI partner of choice, and that's giving us a lot of traction.

Now you look, I mentioned financial services, energy, utilities, but you look at manufacturing, you look at telco, some of the work we are doing in those industries, there are large programs in the pipeline for things which was within that six grouping. Take an example of building agents, take an example of legacy modernization.

We are also seeing a lot of discussions with clients which are a combination of tech services and operations, tech and ops type of businesses. There again, we are in a good position which is in the pipeline, so that is giving us the feeling that this is looking similar to where we were, it's not something has suddenly changed in that sense, at least with our client base and so on at this stage, what we see.

Then I think on acquisitions you've seen we did two acquisitions. The thing with that is the pipeline, again, we have Jayesh and Shaji looking at a very strong pipeline.

We have a very careful approach: strategic fit, cultural fit, value fit. It has a lot of integration, we have to know how it's going to integrate into where and so on.

All that keeping in mind, we could see suddenly a lot, but suddenly it could be three quarters of nothing also. We are in it, meaning we are looking.

What we did on acquisition was healthcare, healthcare we see a good market, we have a good business, we think we can do more, it was a good way to expand, and I think it's a good company there in the sense of we will be integrating and culturally it's aligned. Same on insurance, that's a company which is working with the Guidewire platform package, so that is something which we are very keen on expanding.

Like that acquisitions will continue. On Mythos, I think there are multiple things, because not everything is released to everyone, but we have some, let's say, good relationships with the company to understand a little bit from the outside.

It is exposing more vulnerabilities than one thought possible previously. However, other models are also exposing vulnerabilities.

The question of running those models in that way, my sense is it may also open up opportunities for work for Infosys, which is to help clients to say, "Look, how can we make sure that you don't succumb to that vulnerability?" We are looking at it both ways.

My early, very early discussions, but my sense is if we build a good capability in that, we could help our clients to say, "Look, let's make sure that your vulnerabilities are better and quickly protected."

AI revenue.

AI revenue, yeah, exactly.

[unclear] Our AI,

meaning we are not sharing the number, but it's growing.

Not sharing, because last quarter you disclosed it for the first time. Why are you not disclosing it?

No, what we did was in the AI Investor Day, it was a strategic sort of a outlook. We want to just make sure that we communicated that it is in a material way and it is growing nicely.

At one stage we will, but today we are not sharing it.

Has it touched double digit of your revenue, is it now 10% of Infosys' revenues?

Is it 10% or 15%? We're not sharing the number.

I think a couple of questions for Jayesh.

Yes, Jayesh.

If you look—

On the net employee—

If you look at the headcount, our headcount sequentially has gone down by 8,000 employees, but if you look at on a year-on-year basis, it's still grown by 5,000. There's always some quarterly seasonality, but if you keep that aside for a moment, headcount is a function of the number of people that you have, the utilization that you have, the volumes that you see.

This quarter, the volumes were softer and that equation is what we'll end up net hiring, plus the freshers that you have in the system. I think it's all the demand-supply equation and that's how it'll play out.

The output is a result at the end of the day in my mind. That's how the headcount will play out.

We don't really think it's going to be sequentially number which will keep going down at the end of the day. It's one of the things.

I think the way you should look at it is a full-year basis where we have still grown 5,000 as a headcount. On the wage, we haven't really made a decision at this point in time in the quantum and the timing of it.

Once we decide, we will let you know.

Thank you. Thanks, Chandra.

The next question is from Shilpa Phadnis from The Times of India.

Hello, sir. If succession planning at Infosys is a slow build-out, the archetype of the reinventor CEO is going to look very different, AI-native, consulting-led.

You have some of the internal contenders for the next leg of succession, some of them are in the room. Previously you disbanded the president structure.

Do you think you're going to reintroduce that just to hot up the internal slate for the succession planning?

No comment on that.

Okay. Sir, also if you can talk about if you just revisit your deal pipeline today, what part of it lends itself to AI deflation, and how are you going to offset those, especially when clients are very demanding when it comes to productivity gains?

There, what we shared in that AI Investor Day is how we are looking at it. We have really three areas which we see a growth area.

One was we talked a little bit about the AI services which are growing quite nicely. One I mentioned the large deals and the net new part of the large deals which gives us the expansion, the next-year revenue of that.

Then the third, which we have been working on internally and is growing well, is we are expanding into clients where we have a smaller presence today, but which are very strong relationships of Infosys. This is different from the large deals, which are with more larger presence.

There we are seeing a very good growth. What Jayesh mentioned, there are investments we've done especially on AI and on this program where we look at large companies where we have a smaller presence.

Those are the three areas of growth. Then what you mentioned is the AI productivity, which is what clients are looking at, and we are participating.

We have because of what we have built with the Topaz fabric a very good idea of what is doable now, what is doable in the future, and a lot of the tech and ops deals bring that to play right away. Typically, we're also seeing in not all, but in many of those deals in the pipeline, given the credibility of Infosys and trust, we see something adjacent which gives us an expansion of scope.

While it's a productivity improvement in some, but overall scope expansion or what they call the consolidation. Based on all of that, first, we grew in last year.

If you sort of Jayesh's points, there were some additional things like-for-like grew even more than 3.1%. With that, we're going to grow in terms of our forecast for next year.

That shows us that while there is compression, the growth part of our work is larger today than the compression, which is why we are growing.

Sir, and one last thing on Daimler account. If you can help us, that was one of your flagship accounts.

With that winding down, if you can help us understand, was the assessment largely around the capability gap there, and how would you look at backfilling those revenues, and was that factored in your guidance, which is slightly broad-based for the current financial year?

I have no specific comment on any specific client, but maybe on the manufacturing you have something on the guidance?

Manufacturing per se is going to be going through a challenging environment, especially the European automobile sector. Within that, we do have certain headwinds from a particular client which will wind down towards the end of the year.

That is baked in the guidance right now. Our guidance is two points generally and that is baked in already in the guidance.

It's not an expanded guidance per se.

Thanks, Shilpa. The next question is from The New Indian Express, Padmini.

Hi, good evening. How is BFSI adopting to AI agents?

Are they facing any hiccups because the regulations are tighter there? Is AI beginning to compress the traditional IT services model, can you quantify it?

Which current revenue streams of yours are at risk by being cannibalized by AI?

In financial services, what we're seeing is clients are moving very quickly to adopt AI. As an example, if you look at a bank, they're doing the KYC process, AML process, there's a lot of agents being built for that process which is growing our revenue and helping them by doing that work with AI.

If you look at things on credit, we are doing something with AI there. If you look at building out new capabilities, AI is being used.

If you look at legacy modernization again in banks, meaning some technology which is on an older generation of technology to bring it to current generation, a lot of that is being done with the foundation models. Financial services clients are adopting it quickly.

We have partnered with the foundation model companies and other AI leaders, and that is giving us an advantage into that market. We see the growth is actually accelerating in that industry for us, our business.

That is also including the compression. There is compression because of the points we shared earlier on the productivity that clients are looking for, and some other areas which can be more easily used in AI work.

It's a combination of those two, but despite that, we are seeing the growth of the financial services.

Thank you.

Is it compressing your traditional IT services model, AI, and any particular revenue stream that is being cannibalized? There, yeah,

no, it is definitely. The compression is coming on some of the services, and the growth is coming on other services.

The compression is typically in the areas where the AI foundation models and some of the tools are very efficient on that. You can see that in some of the tech services work, you can see that in some of the BPM work, and so on.

It's combined with the growth that we're also seeing, and that balance is where overall we see growth, and in financial services we see growth.

Thanks, Padmini. The next question is from Shrishti from The Economic Times.

Good evening, gentlemen. This quarter we're seeing a sharp contraction, a sequential contraction as far as TCV is concerned.

Is that a factor of clients cutting back on your discretionary spending or is it the AI-led deflation that we're seeing this? Secondly, Jayesh mentioned that there are regulatory delays as far as closing of Versant acquisition is concerned.

Could you give us a bit more color on why these delays are happening, because it was supposed to be closed by this financial year?

When you say TCV must be large deals, I thought we had a good large deals at $3.2 billion for the quarter. I would say nothing unusual in that.

The large deals are always a little bit variable, and $3.2 billion is a large number for large deals for the way we look at it, larger than $50 million deal value. We had the number of deals was good, the overall year at $14.9 billion is much larger than what we had last year as well.

We didn't see something change so much in the actual large deal value for us.

We do see a sequential contraction as far as large deals, quarter four. Is that because—

Last quarter.

Go on. If you look at last quarter, we had a mega deal with one of the UK clients that we had, and that kind of increased the overall number.

If you take that deal out, the numbers are comparable. The mega deals are always lumpy, it happens.

It doesn't happen every quarter, right? You'll always have that variability because of mega deal in the large deal equation.

As Salil was saying, we've delivered $15 billion of large deal for the year, 55% net new. On a year-on-year basis, it's 20 24% increase.

It's a very healthy performance from that perspective. On the Versant acquisition, I think these are regulatory approval matters.

There are questions or queries that we have received from the regulator that we have responded to. It's a process that at times is unpredictable.

Also, if you could give us a bit of commentary on what the direct impact of this geopolitical conflicts that are happening. Are clients talking to you about any kind of delays in decision-making that they are having?

There, I think, typically we see there's no specific view in that except that overall the thinking is to sort of see how it plays out. Now as we are seeing the current situation, it looks like things may stabilize.

With that, the mindset now is that underlying many things in some of those Western economies are quite good, what they call it, they're resilient. They've been the way people have described it.

If that continues, we will see, that always has some correlation to tech being supported. My sense is if that happens, we will see some more of the tech spend there.

Thank you. The next question is from Sai Ishwar from Reuters News.

Hi, gentlemen. Just two things.

If I just look at North America's revenue contribution, it's been constantly falling from 57% to I think 55%, and Europe is growing. I just wanted to know is there a specific trend there?

Also I wanted to ask on how other geographies like top geographies are playing, because you've given some color on based on business segments, but how is the US, Europe market like in terms of growth, in terms of opportunities? Thank you.

Between US, Europe, and then on the—

Yeah. See, if you look at Europe, we have had a multiple large and mega deal wins in Europe.

That is pretty much contributing to the faster growth in Europe. If you look at, for example, one of the largest manufacturing deal that we signed a few years back is from Europe.

The NHS deal that we signed is from Europe. There are a few other, Liberty Global is a deal that we signed is from Europe.

I think those are the mega deals that we have that has contributed a better growth in Europe compared to the US.

In other geographies, first, within the US, there are pockets where we're doing extremely well as well, some of the industries I've mentioned before. We have a smaller business, but like some of the new geographies like Japan, we're doing quite well.

There are things even in Europe, what Jayesh was mentioning, if you look at some of the Nordic markets, we're doing quite well and growing nicely. It's different places where we put the investment, and there's the local sort of economic environment is good.

We see the growth is quite okay.

Thank you, Sai. The next question is from Avik Das from Business Standard.

Hi, two quick questions. Salil, if you can just throw some light on the GCC business, specifically considering the fact that have you seen an increased number of, let's say, mid-market GCCs who have sort of failed to attain the desired level of maturity, carving out certain businesses, brownfield businesses or operations, and actually giving it to the service providers like you or the other ones?

Have you seen any heightened pace? Just wanted to get some light on that.

Jayesh, if you can also tell me that when you talk about no wage hikes, immediate announcements right now, last year you followed a normal April to March cycle. Again, this time it's sort of a little distorted.

Wanted to understand, this has been going on for the last four, five years. Is there any chance over the next 12 months or 15 months where you see this movement, this volatile movement, actually stabilizing?

How much do you see this being a little challenging for the morale of employees going forward?

Let me start on the GCC. The first, we have a robust business with the GCC clients.

In fact, we have a event tomorrow which is sort of a large event with almost all the GCC leadership in India where we want to share some insights. We've done something quite special on sort of GCCs built for AI.

We've recently had some good success with clients in that. I think your point it depends.

I don't see a trend like that, but there are some examples, I think. Those are very much in the public domain.

There are some examples of that. In general, it's a very strong area of activity for companies, global companies, and for us to partner with them both outside and in India to support them in their different ways, from starting it, scaling it, the BOT type of model, how we make sure the AI skilling is right there at the beginning.

That what we think is really working even better is these AI sort of driven GCC, which is where the new attention is with most of our clients.

On the wage, whenever we have decided about the wage or when we consider about the wage, there are various factors that play out, right? What is the performance of the company?

What are we expecting next few quarters? What is the industry practice?

How is the industry expected to grow? What the other three peers in the market has done?

Inflation in respective markets. All of these, and of course the employee morale and all of those factors.

We consider all of those factors and we decide the wage, right? Then we will decide it accordingly.

All the factors are always considered.

Thank you, Avik. The next question is from Sanjana from The Hindu Business Line.

Good evening, gentlemen. How is Infosys recalibrating to navigate this era of uncertainty that has persisted for a few quarters now?

If you could expand on your strategy. Also, going ahead, will you take up large transformation programs like legacy modernization, for example, that may be initially margin dilutive?

Also some brokerages have pointed out that visa costs may have emerged as a headwind for you this quarter, if you could expand on that, on whether it's offsetting cross-currency benefits due to rupee depreciation. That's it from my end.

The first was on how will we navigate and what our strategic approach. I think there what we are seeing is the AI approach that we have shared is really resonating with our clients.

The six areas, whether it's AI strategy engineering, it's legacy modernization, the process work, the work that's on trust, all of those are something which we can see activity with clients in partnership with the foundation model companies, with the tools that are being built on the foundation models, with the large tech cloud players. That I think is one of the core elements of the direction.

It's a big AI transformation that we are seeing over the next several years within our work. Outside of that, I think we are building big focus on making sure that the productivity benefits that are available are something that the clients will receive.

Hopefully, we'll keep a little part of it to make sure what we discussed earlier, the resilience in our margin will continue with that. The first part is more for the growth, the second part is more for the margin.

We see essentially the roadmap, we've laid it out, we've started the execution, and the early steps are in a good direction.

Large transformation. Large transformation

programs.

We will absolutely take large transformation programs, but we are very clear that it has to be with an economic profile we can manage. Now having said that, we have a large business.

It's a portfolio of activities, but in the portfolio, we want to make sure that we can manage the commitments we're making and the objectives we have internally. Of course, we are doing them.

Some of the legacy modernization programs, a lot of them become self-funded because there's one example, we're doing a program with a transport company. There the work is to take from an older technology onto a microservices architecture.

The work is going well. The way the estimates or the cost has come, it's 60% lower than what they would have done before the AI approach.

The time is also that much less. We are part of that program working with a partner to get it done.

In fact, that's in our pipeline, there's a lot of those sorts of things, and there's a few that we're executing also today.

The visa costs offsetting.

Sorry, what is the question, if you could repeat? Visa costs.

Offsetting cross-currency benefits.

No, visa costs for us has remained stable. We have not really increased our visa cost.

The H-1B visa in the new regime, we have not filed it, our visa costs has remained stable.

Thank you. The next question is from Uma Kannan from the Deccan Herald.

Thank you, Rishi. Good evening, gentlemen.

Now that AI is part of every project, I want to understand, are clients asking you to cut down expenses, this includes people as well? Are you finding it hard to retain business from existing clients given current uncertainties?

Are you seeing any project ramp-downs?

There, every discussion, as you said, is AI is part of it. There are some which we call it this AI first services, which is the new work in the six areas that we've laid out.

Then what we've also done is all of our work we call it AI augmented services, meaning everything we do, we have now infused the AI into it. Every client discussion has got this AI now in it.

There are some work which we do which is oriented to growth. We did a project for a consumer products company where we built something which the person who was buying can use on an app, and that increased the connect with their customer and increased their sales, and so on.

That is not a cost program. The ones that are more cost, the clients will always look for the productivity improvement.

Because of these tools and what we have built in the Topaz fabric, we are able to create that for the clients. On balance, we have the growth and the compression.

Last year, the growth, we had 3.1% with all of the variations much higher, and even in the forecast, we have a growth. We are getting the growth more than the compression at this stage.

Just one more question. You have partnered with AI companies, and recently you announced partnership with OpenAI.

How these are actually helping your clients? You did speak about it, but I just want to understand, are you seeing projects moving from pilots to production?

There are a number of projects on production, large-scale projects. Again, if you look at the two that I just described, transport and consumer products, those are large programs.

There's not a pilot at all. In the AI Day, we described about 12 or so projects which are actual large projects with clients.

The partnerships who you mentioned, we just announced the OpenAI partnership yesterday. We announced the Anthropic partnership a few weeks ago.

The way these are working is they have some good technology on the foundation models. With that, in any of those six areas of our AI services, we can take that as a partner and work with our clients.

Even in what we shared in the AI Day, we showed some examples of clients and where they are on that hexagon to say how we are partnering with someone and how we are going to that client to actually create revenue for Infosys and more activity for Infosys.

Thank you. The next question is from Poulomi Chatterjee from The Financial Express.

Good evening. Just a couple of questions.

I just wanted to understand the reason behind the quarterly decline in headcount, and also as there's new lines of AI services emerging and you're hiring freshers in that regard, how is the composition of freshers in terms of coding or consulting and these newer roles? Also how has pricing evolved so that you've been able to capture value adequately from these AI-led services?

You want to start on the first?

Yeah. If you look at the headcount, as I said earlier, the headcount is a function of what is the growth that you're getting in terms of volume, the utilization that we have, and so on.

That's how we derive at the number of people that we need to hire laterally or etc. If you look at this quarter, the volumes were softer, and utilization was lower, that is why a resultant headcount is lower.

Ideally, you should look at it a little longer term, and if you look at the full-year basis, we have added 5,000 people on the headcount, so that's what I would want to say. In terms of pricing, I think pricing environment for us has remained stable.

On the contrary, actually, most of our growth this year has been pricing-led because the volumes have been softer. That in a way corroborates with the fact that the AI revenue are coming at a better pricing.

In terms of the people, one just on the Q4, a little bit the seasonalities that what Jayesh was saying. It's every year we have this scenario where in the Q4 or Q3 is a little bit like second half is a little bit less than the first half, it's just the nature of our our activity.

On the people that we are bringing in, there, in fact, our HR team with Shaji and Sushanth have built an amazing model of how we are skilling them and how at different levels we are bringing them. We're not only bringing people with one type of skill set, we have different starting compensation for for people who are coming with different skills who are more attuned to AI.

Then we are building the forward deployed engineer team, which is being done to make sure that we can do more work directly with clients on business and tech, which is AI tech, to make the AI solutions. Both of those are getting developed quite rapidly, and the skilling has gone on I think over 90% of our people, yeah, about over 90% of people are now getting skilled on different types of the AI platforms.

Thank you. The next question is from Jas Bardia from Mint.

Good evening. Three questions.

The first one, multiple brokerages have pointed out that the three acquisitions y'all announced last fiscal would contribute around 200 to 225 basis points of growth in FY27. Considering that has not been factored into the guidance, if we factor the contribution from those acquisitions, that translates to the fastest growth for the company in at least 3 years.

How do you see this going forward? If you can help me understand the growth trajectory in that sense a little bit more, considering your peers have called out AI-led deflation, multiple clients pulling back their tech spending, that's one.

Second, on board oversight of AI. How is Infosys' board actually overseeing the way AI is used for clients as well as internally?

A peer of one of your peers is giving incentives to executives for passing on productivity gains to clients and many other such measures. What is Infosys doing in that sense?

Lastly, if you can throw a little more light on the kind of acquisitions you will be looking at going ahead. That's it.

On the first one, I think so Jayesh shared that like the one acquisition that is closed, we have already put that in. I think the estimates are meaning we when we announced the acquisition, the revenue number is known and so on, what you're describing, I'm guessing, is based on that analysis.

It's just a function of like which date it will close. Sometimes like it may take a week, it may take a month, it may take 2 months, it's not going to take 5 years.

It it will get sorted in this thing. My guess is so what we are thinking there's no like we're not trying to give a guidance assuming like it'll come in, but as soon as it comes in, we will obviously put that in and do it.

I think the maths what you're saying, on a full-year basis is approximately correct, so that's not a problem on that at all. Our growth trajectory, I know what you said like with some some other things in the industry, but we see this growth for this year even without acquisitions.

There's a growth and with it, and we will continue to see that. I think we are very clear that with that AI services work, some of the other things we talked about earlier, like on the large deals and so on, we we see the growth coming.

Yes, there is compression, but we are managing that growth today and and the forecast for this year is very clear on the growth side. Then the

On the board oversight.

the board. In fact, as you noticed, we were a bit late today coming.

We just had an update. We had like a full what we did in the AI Investor Day, we did the full update with a lot more detail internally and there was a lot of discussion.

The board is very active in our AI work looking at it. Actually Nandan himself is very active because he he's got a very good vision on the where the AI is going, and also helping like a lot of the Topaz fabric, what we have done, he's working to give us the ideas, which of course we are building it, but he's he's the visionary person on that one.

Kind of

acquisitions. Yeah.

We will continue to do acquisitions. There's a good pipeline.

We did two which came by coincidence together. In general, we will continue to do acquisitions in areas like the healthcare, which we did, where we feel we can expand nicely and the market is good.

Just one last question, Chief, if I can just squeeze it in. What kind of contracts are you seeing, and how have they evolved over the last 3 to 4 years from fixed price to outcome-based?

If you can just shed some more light on that. Also, wonderful to hear of Mr.

Nilekani, but if you can just shed some more light on what are some of the means that the board is having a tab on whatever AI goes out and the kind of AI work that Infosys does?

There's no specific thing like that on what the board is doing, but they're very involved in it. Nandan himself is there on it.

On the contracts, we are continuing to see the type of contracting that we were doing in the past. There's a lot of discussions now that can we look at some things because the AI is transformative, that can we look at something which is outcome-based.

We have built with our delivery leadership, with our sales leadership, good models or templates for how those are to be done, and there are active discussions. It's still early times, but over time, there may be more of that.

There are discussions on that, but a lot of the contracts are also on the way that they were being done in the past as well.

Thank you. With that, we come to the end of this press conference.

We thank our friends from media. Thank you, Salil, and thank you, Jayesh.

Before we conclude, please note that the archived webcast of this press conference will be available on the Infosys website and on our YouTube channel later today. Thank you, and please join us for high tea outside.