Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consultation. Infosys announced their AI-first set of services, solutions, and platforms-Topaz to accelerate business value for global enterprises by leveraging a wide range of AI solutions, including generative AI that is specially geared towards this purpose. It leverages Infosys applied AI framework to build an AI-first core. Topaz harnesses the power of Infosys Cobalt cloud and data analytics to AI-based businesses, delivering solutions and intuitive experiences that enhance growth. It is one of the most comprehensive data, analytics and AI services brands in today’s market. 

Here is the conversation with Balakrishna D.R (Bali), the Executive Vice-President-Global Head AI and Automation and ECS of Infosys, who talks about the journey of Infosys Topaz so far.

How does Infosys Topaz aid in reimagining business processes? 

Infosys Topaz predominantly enables enterprises to operate with never-before efficiencies while unlocking new avenues to business value. Infosys Topaz brings together the power of data analytics and AI technologies, including generative AI. It gives enterprises a jumpstart with 12,000+ AI assets, 150+ pre-trained AI models, and 10+ AI platforms steered by AI-first specialists and data strategists. With a ‘responsible by design’ approach, it creates the opportunity for enterprises to leapfrog and realise true potential from their transformation initiatives.

Could you share insights on the industries that would benefit from Topaz?

Infosys Topaz encompasses differentiated offerings for all industries and business challenges. A few examples include:

• During the pandemic, an international retail chain outlet benefited from the democratisation of data insights from internal, external, and marketplace sources made possible by Infosys Topaz. This helped them bring together hitherto unconnected data signals and predict demand coming in from digital sources with an accuracy of >95%, enabling them to harness >60% of the opportunity at a time when in-store footfall was adversely impacted.
• A British bank required customer data to be digitised, refined, and stored in a searchable format to drive actionable insights around complaint patterns, customer churn, and experience. With Infosys Topaz, they developed a Contact Center Intelligence solution complete with conversational analytics, call intent prediction, agent performance analysis, and sentiment analysis. Over two thousand processes, which otherwise took weeks to complete, were automated and orchestrated for near real-time fulfilment.
• A multinational oil and gas company is transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. Their downstream retail business, associated with the fuel pumping stations, must adapt to the economics of renewable fuel charging stations that engage users for 20-60 minutes. The company leveraged Infosys Topaz to plan its retail growth models based on consumer data insights and AI modelling. 
• A telecom major wanted to future-proof their AI/ML architecture using Infosys Topaz and build a robust, scalable, and template-driven MLOps platform. Infosys implemented MLOps principles and a blueprint for deploying various patterns like real-time model serving batch using cloud-native principles. This ensured that the solution is largely portable and can also be deployed on-premises and on various cloud providers, like Azure and GCP, resulting in a standardised and scalable platform.
• A multinational food company was experiencing a disconnected customer journey and fragmented recommendations, which resulted in less engagement and an increased bounce rate. Infosys Topaz delivered a Cognitive First solution that included a consumer preference graph with insights on the intent, context, and preferences of the consumers for better personalisation and recommendation. It provided cognitive orchestration to push contextualised brand-specific messages across locations and demographics. This decreased the bounce rate and improved customer engagement, personalisation, and productivity via MLOps.
• A telecom company faced challenges in providing content to the visual and the hearing impaired. Infosys Topaz created an end-to-end framework that provided visual captioning – generated audio descriptions/narration of the visual scenes in a streaming movie/program when requested by visually impaired customers in near real-time. For customers with hearing impaired, the offering helped generate automatic closed captioning for live-streaming content in near real-time. It also classified various sounds in a household by providing visual notifications to the users through TV/phone for important sounds. The inspiration came from the feedback from hearing-impaired customers who often miss household sound-based notifications, e.g., smoke detector alarm, doorbell, phone ring etc. This way, Infosys Topaz helps improve the quality of life for people with both visual and hearing disability.

What encouraged Infosys to build a platform like Topaz?

With the increase in the transition of organisations to AI-first enterprises, to unlock new avenues of business values, we are seeing a strong demand from clients embarking on their journey to be AI native for offerings like Infosys Topaz. That was the impetus for us to build an all-encompassing offering that is a composite of our technical and domain expertise, services, accelerators for building AI systems, solutions, and an ecosystem of partners we work with.

This is also a culmination of the collective expertise we have built and continues to build by implementing hundreds of state-of-the-art AI solutions across leading enterprises, multiple initiatives to transform Infosys into an AI-first organisation, and our significant investments in talent and technology. Our applied AI framework helped democratise AI by scaling enterprise-grade AI through the Applied AI Cloud to access, deploy, and contextualise services. 

Ethical concerns around AI are a major challenge in the industry currently. Can you briefly explain how Topaz will combat it through its ‘responsible by design’ approach?

Infosys is committed to ensuring its AI solutions are ethical, transparent, and fair. We have technical systems, frameworks, and tools to ensure ethical, bias-free, explainable AI development, deployment, and use. Infosys also adheres to and enables enterprises to comply with data privacy regulations and best practices to safeguard sensitive data through secure and explainable AI. Notably, in the context of generative AI, there are multiple concerns like IP, privacy violations, toxicity, hallucination, AI security, etc. Infosys and our partner ecosystem have built technical and policy-driven guardrails to ensure fair, explainable, and secure AI systems. 

How does Topaz boost productivity and efficiency in business?

Infosys Topaz has a wide arsenal of powerful AI solutions like computer vision, conversational AI, advanced analytics, intelligent automation etc. These can aid in various core business processes, bringing end-to-end transformation if needed. Some of the benefits of Infosys Topaz include:

• Revenue boost due to better sales, cost savings, reduced missed opportunities, launching of new products and services, expanding customer base etc.
• Improving operational efficiency and reducing wastages; ensuring better real-time visibility and the ability to take preventive actions and promote faster decision making. 
• Building sustainable businesses in-line with regulations. 
• Amplifying human potential and empowering the workforce to deliver exceptional results consistently.
• Encompassing generative AI-based solutions for content creation in the marketing and entertainment industry; market research; product design generation; idea generation for new products; enabling specialised AI assistants for customer service; enhancing knowledge gathering and search tools; code generation; synthetic data generation; generating simulation like digital twins; drug discovery; and AR/VR technologies.

Can you describe some of the challenges faced while implementing Topaz?

Infosys Topaz has been designed to aid customers at different levels in their AI journey. Our Applied AI strategy is powered by our 3D framework (Discover, Democratize and De-risk), which tackles all the complexities and roadblocks from the conception stage to the final delivery of AI projects. It consists of several consulting activities and sets of accelerators spread across the 3 phases, which help businesses develop a strong roadmap for enterprise AI adoption and ensure stakeholder buy-in.