Infosys shares rally 8% in 5 sessions: CEO Salil Parekh sees AI driving half of work in 2-3 years

IT services major Infosys extended its rally on Wednesday, October 14. The stock traded 2% higher in the early deals. With today's rally, the IT services giant's stock has jumped over 8% over the past five sessions.

At 10:19 AM, the scrip stood at ₹1,088.05, up ₹25.95, or 2.44 %. It hit a high of ₹1,089.80 in the opening deals, up 2.6% against the previous close of ₹1,062.10.

The stock continued its rally following the CEO statement on AI services. CEO and MD Salil Parekh said on Tuesday that Infosys' AI services, which accounted for over 8% of its revenue last quarter and are growing at a double-digit rate sequentially, are likely to drive almost half of its work in two to three years.

Parekh said the business, which includes building AI agents, coding work and modernising old technology for clients, is small relative to the company’s size but growing so fast that it could account for 20-30 per cent of Infosys’ work within a few quarters if the current pace continues.

"It (AI services) is growing at a fantastic pace. If you sort of extrapolate that by a few quarters, you already start to see that's 20-30% of our work in a few quarters, and maybe in two or three years, almost half of our work," Parekh said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum 2026.

Parekh said the growth showed there was "a huge demand" for such services.

Other key details

Responding to questions about the viability of India’s IT services industry as AI advances, Parekh said, "My own sense is it is good news for Infosys, and by sort of that same view, good news for the tech services in India".

Infosys hired 20,000 college graduates last year and plans to hire another 20,000 this financial year, Parekh said.

These graduates are trained in AI and then work with clients to deploy the technology and manage change.

Of Infosys' 3 lakh employees, about 80,000 are already working on coding tools for clients and on some internal projects, he said.

Client adoption and infrastructure challenges

Asked how companies were adopting AI, Parekh said enterprise clients are already good users of AI services.

With strong demand and capacity still being built, clients are now looking at whether they could use lower-cost tokens for the same work, considering cheaper or open-weight models instead of the most recent ones, the CEO said.

Asked whether physical infrastructure was keeping pace with AI and cloud advancements, Parekh said data had become critical to the AI ecosystem.

Stricter sovereign data and cloud requirements are further restricting some of the capacity build-outs, Parekh said.

Risks around AI boom

Parekh also flagged long-term risks in the AI boom, citing the high cost of chips, uncertainty over how long data-centre capacity will remain relevant, and the possibility of new AI models significantly lowering inference costs.

The CEO also warned of a potential social backlash against AI, particularly in Western markets, adding that the impact of these risks could become visible in five to 10 years.

With inputs from PTI