Infosys AI tool to 'dramatically lower' costs for businesses

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Infosys Mana, the AI tool can help a business combine information about its operations with machine learning to automate repetitive and mundane tasks, and free up people to be more creative.

Infosys Ltd., India’s second-largest software services company, has built an artificial intelligence-based tool that will “dramatically lower” the cost of maintenance be it of machines in a factory or software programs and other “digital assets,” the company said in a press release on Thursday.

Named Infosys Mana, the AI tool can help a business combine information about its operations with machine learning to automate repetitive and mundane tasks, and free up people to be more creative, eventually lead-ing to improvements in their end-customers’ experience, Infosys said. “Mana” refers to “a pervasive spiritual force” in Polynesian, Infosys said in the release. It is also an Indic word for the human mind.

“Technology helps us see things that aren’t otherwise visible to us,” Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka said in a talk in San Francisco, ahead of the announcement, at the company’s two-day annual jamboree, Infosys Confluence, a gathering of staff, customers, investors and other invited guests and speakers. He was citing former U.S. vice president and environmentalist Al Gore who had spoken earlier at the three-day event that concludes on Friday.

Sikka, who has a computer science PhD from Stanford University, has been a strong proponent of the use of AI to “amplify” human ability to solve long-term problems. He has also put AI at the heart of a shorter-term goal: to transform Infosys from a warm-bodies provider that had lost its mojo a bit, when he was hired 21 months ago, to an innovation powerhouse.

“We can automate the repetitive, mechanisable tasks; we can capture the knowledge and knowhow across people and long-lived systems … free people to put all of our creativity, passion, and imagination into thinking about the bigger opportunities ahead of us,” he said in the press release.

Mana, along with other services Infosys has built around capturing in-formation from disparate sources and making continuous changes to operations, helps businesses tap critical knowledge that is locked inside source code, application silos, maintenance logs, exception tickets and individual employees.

One Infosys customer, a company with a large fleet of field engineers, individual productivity improved by up to 50 percent by using the self-learning capabilities of the platform. A large global telecommunications company reduced data entry effort of agents by up to 80 percent by automating order validation and removing the need for corrective processes.

Another customer, a global food and beverage manufacturer, automated the resolution of maintenance tickets of recurring issues. As the system self-learned, over time it provided solutions to known problems automatically, Infosys said in the release.