Salil Parekh on Handing Over Infosys "Better" Than He Found It

Salil Parekh recently confirmed he will step down as Infosys CEO and Managing Director on March 31, 2027, closing out a tenure that began in January 2018 under genuinely difficult circumstances — governance disputes and leadership churn had left the company needing stability as much as strategy. In a recent interview reflecting on that period, Parekh was matter-of-fact about the scorecard he's leaving behind: Infosys has doubled its annual revenue from $10 billion to $20 billion, grown its workforce past 300,000 employees, and rebuilt a leadership pipeline he believes leaves the company positioned to keep growing without him.

The AI Bet That Defines His Final Years

Much of Parekh's recent public commentary has focused on a single argument: that AI, rather than gutting the IT services model the way some analysts fear, is creating a new and growing category of revenue for Infosys. Speaking at Davos in January 2026, he said more than 90 percent of Infosys's top 200 clients were already engaged in AI-related programmes, spanning roughly 4,600 active initiatives across the client base. He identified software development and legacy-system modernisation as two areas where AI-led tools are making previously uneconomical projects viable — which he framed as genuinely new technology spending, not a reallocation of existing budgets.

Parekh has been candid that this isn't a one-directional story. He's acknowledged that AI adoption could compress revenue in some of Infosys's traditional service lines, even as he maintains that the growth opportunities from AI-driven work should outweigh that compression over the medium term. That balance — acknowledging the disruption while betting the net effect favors growth — has been the consistent throughline across his public remarks this year, from Davos through Infosys's quarterly earnings calls.

The Numbers Behind the Optimism

The results so far have given Parekh's confidence some backing. Infosys raised its FY26 revenue growth guidance to 3-3.5 percent, an upward revision analysts called a "positive surprise" for an Indian IT sector that has spent much of the past two years under demand pressure. Parekh has pointed specifically to financial services and energy and utilities as sectors where discretionary technology spending has visibly returned, and has said pricing and realisations have actually improved over the past two years despite competitive intensity in AI services.

Engineers, Not Replacements

On the question that hangs over every IT services conversation in 2026 — whether AI ultimately reduces headcount — Parekh has been direct: the technology is enhancing software engineering productivity rather than replacing engineers, a framing consistent with Infosys's announced plan to hire 20,000 graduates in FY27, betting on AI-native talent entering the workforce rather than a shrinking one.

Why It Matters for Market Leaders

Parekh's exit-stage interviews are a useful data point precisely because they're not a victory lap detached from scrutiny — he's making a specific, falsifiable bet in public: that AI-driven revenue will outpace whatever traditional service-line revenue it displaces, and that the company can keep growing headcount while deploying the technology aggressively. Whether that bet holds will be judged well after he's handed the company to his successor — which is arguably the most honest kind of leadership legacy a market-leading CEO can leave behind.

Executive Interviews

At www.elevatexstudios.com / ElevateX Studios, Executive Interviews, part of our Market Leaders coverage, brings you conversations with the executives steering India's largest companies through their most consequential strategic bets.