Digital technologies continue to disrupt every business as we know it. In response, IT service providers must first help clients navigate the disruption to future-proof their business, innovate, and grow. Then, they must do the same for themselves. From a conventional services and applications provider to a problem-finder, strategic advisor and innovator of next-generation services, the role of the IT service provider has irrevocably changed.

Technologies for smart automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are fuelling this change in the way IT services are delivered. The implementation of these technologies is resulting in pervasive automation, moving the industry away from the conventional 'people only' IT services delivery model to a much more powerful 'people plus software' model to deliver these essential services.

Following a whirlwind phase of annual and quarterly results, clients meetings, and setting up new operations, I cannot wait to be at Infosys Confluence, our thought leadership summit for clients, prospects, and market influencers. Like every year, this gathering pushes the pause button on my hectic schedule - offering a Zen-like stillness, if you will, to ideate, introspect and envision with some of the best minds across industries. This time the theme, 'Unlimit', will add a new dimension to this pause. Exchanging thoughts on unlimiting our innate human potential, empowered by technology; unlimiting traditional boundaries of industries; unlimiting from that past that is baggage.

Pondering on the theme, I realize how 'Unlimit' is actually the core force driving successful digital-native organizations today. Here's an example. A Swedish startup, Mapillary, built their database of 130 million images through crowdsourcing. Mapillary Vistas Dataset calls itself "the largest and most diverse database for object recognition on street-level imagery" and offers its data to organizations that need to train their AI systems. Its creators want to represent the whole world (not only streets) with photos sourced through crowdsourcing.

Once again today, I have this deep sense that we are all standing on the brink of a great revolution. A revolution unlike anything humanity has known before. A revolution driven by computing and digital technologies - fundamentally changing the way we go about our work and lives. And I am glad to have this opportunity - even if in a small way - to guide its development, and grasp the opportunity to direct it to create a future where tens and thousands of people will have a better chance to build for themselves the lives that they aspire to live. While it's certainly not the first time my thoughts have taken this turn, today it's triggered by the announcement we just made to hire 10,000 American workers, and set up four Technology and Innovation Hubs with integrated training infrastructure, in the U.S., to help nurture the next generation of American innovators.

When we think about the context in which we must nurture young talent in our workplaces, we clearly see that automation technologies are already doing much of our problem solving. In fact, solutions to most known, well-defined problems - the challenges that we've cracked before - can now be executed by software. Which means the jobs that were performed by earlier generations are all now ripe for automation, and in many cases, already automated. Then, what's the basis on which today's budding careers must be nurtured? The answer clearly lies in our humanity. In learning to cultivate and put to practical use all that makes us human - our curiosity, our creativity and our hunger to learn and grow. Because, while automated systems may surpass humans in performing well-defined cognitive tasks (problem-solving), spotting new problems worth solving, and new opportunities to build something that does not yet exist (problem-finding) is still an innately human endeavor that no machine has mastered.

This is an interesting time to be a young American. You are beginning your career in the midst of a massive digital revolution, that in part, you helped accelerate by adapting so easily to the connected world we've now created for ourselves. Advancing digital technologies, like Artificial Intelligence, continue to drive this revolution, and reshape the space human beings will occupy in it - including what and how our jobs will be.

I often hear questions about how these advances might take away our jobs. And the debates are polarized between those who foresee limitless new opportunities and those that predict massive displacement of jobs. But our most likely tomorrow lies somewhere in between.

26th April, is Intellectual Property Day. The theme for this year according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is 'Innovation - Improving Lives'. As an IT professional, this resonates deeply with me and contextualizes the effort of millions of people, who work with intangible software code to create tangible, positively beautiful products that improve human life.

IP is fundamental to the emerging digital world. Many technologies are required to create a product, and companies often outsource the development of components, or share technologies through licensing arrangements. IP is especially core to the e-commerce economy, which depends on companies working together to share the opportunities and risks of business through licensing.

Recently, Infosys was acknowledged for its application services leadership in NelsonHall's Vendor Evaluation & Assessment Tool (NEAT). While the rating, at one level, is a reflection of our ability to deliver compelling immediate benefits to clients, what's equally relevant is that it's an indicator of our preparedness to fulfil their future needs. Although the report itself acknowledges this, it's my conversations with clients from across the world that strengthens my conviction. It is clear that leaders at the helm of every kind of business are grappling with the same dual agenda - to make problem-solving of well-defined, current challenges more efficient, and simultaneously to also focus on problem-finding and explorations to uncover new avenues of value creation that can serve the enterprise's future. Next-generation services - like the ones referenced in NelsonHall's Evaluation of Infosys - power this duality. And here's how.

These services rely on automation to bring breakthrough productivity to problem-solving endeavors. In fact, the very core of next-gen IT services is based on automation and a people+software delivery model with efficiency benefits that can then be shared with the businesses that commission these services. From bringing automation to IT operations, building process automation, scripting test automation and frameworks for automated knowledge curation, the point then is to focus on doing more, with less for more. Using agile and DevOps capabilities to deliver modern applications in a shorter timeframe is integral to the game plan. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can also be harnessed to bring productivity improvements to work. Advanced AI technologies, when combined with in-depth understanding of the business and the IT landscape, can give businesses the edge of automation while also using critical knowledge locked inside source code, application silos, maintenance logs, exception tickets, and even individual employees, to solve tough business challenges. It can enable systems to predict problems and automate the solving of these problems otherwise requiring skilled people to invest time and effort.

In the food services and logistics industry, it's all about quality, flavor and delivery: customers want their food fast and natural. Advances in technology are altering the farm-to-table journey and the food experience. As Peter Diamandis points out, an average American meal travels 1,500 miles before being consumed. With discerning customers watching their carbon footprint, interest is deepening on where food is grown, how it travels and when it is processed. The way forward is to make sustainability central to food production, adopt automation and robots for cost-efficiency and shift towards smart machinery for efficient farming.

All the goodness of nature

The food industry can be a high risk, low reward business. Unpredictable weather, challenges in food logistics, perishability of food, and transient trends contribute to a perfect storm. Could an innovative enterprise convert these factors of uncertainty into a sustainable food business?

Many of you would have heard about how Google came up with a bold experiment for increasing innovation. The management encouraged employees "not to do their job" daily for about 20 percent of the time they were at work. The idea was to increase the overall health and happiness of employees, who often felt overwhelmed by emails and, more specifically, the demand that they respond to those mails immediately. The reason behind this move, according to the company management, was that sometimes just being not connected for a while could be a way to encourage employees to relax and innovate.

In 1956 the Fortune 500 looked radically different than it does today: over 80 percent are no longer in this exclusive group. Many do not even exist anymore. And the pace of change has increased. A third of those in the ranking a decade ago are no longer listed. Most of these companies had innovation departments... so what went wrong?

Is innovation an expert skill, or a mindset? The key to surviving, and thriving, is about having a workforce with the right skills to be able to anticipate, respond and scale at speed in an uncertain future. This was the message Dr. Vishal Sikka conveyed to the audience at Oracle Open World in San Francisco recently - which you can watch here.

By now it is fairly well accepted across industries that business models of 'old' must give way to new designs. Nowhere else is this truer than in Insurance, where a recent survey revealed that more than 50% of executives expect significant changes in just the next 12 months.

The drivers for the fourth industrial revolution as some pundits will say, are also well understood. Mobile, big data, automation, artificial intelligence, and cloud technologies matched with the Internet of Things are beginning to alter established price and capability tradeoffs, and is spawning a renaissance of InsTech start-ups. Amazon and Facebook are making digital natives out of consumers across age groups, and they expect more from their insurance carriers.

Ah, the benefits of hindsight. Let me begin this blog by giving you three examples of companies that reacted differently to technology disruption and, in some cases, paid the price for it.

Imagine if you could have gone back in time to warn the executives of Eastman Kodak Co. that they might be better off leaving the photography business altogether, earlier than they did. They wouldn't have taken you seriously - even after numerous strategies failed to save the company's traditional line of business. The Eastman Kodak brand was synonymous with photography. The truth is that when a business is built on a legacy technology that is categorically different from the market's new standard, even perfect foresight (in this case, the demise of film or CDs) would not have solved the core problem that digital replacement is fundamentally less profitable.

Dr. Vishal Sikka frequently reminds us that the biggest opportunity that lies before every business today is to launch a human revolution, where we are all able to achieve much higher productivity, to bring much more innovation, and create a future limited only by our aspirations. And that can be made possible by technology - especially automation and AI.

So, one might surmise that a business that is digitized is best equipped to realize this opportunity.

This year's Confluence - our annual thought leadership summit - has the makings of a blockbuster with its compelling content, transformational experiences, and innovations that people can pick up and apply straight off to their businesses. Whether it's the latest ideas for continuous business reinvention, exciting new ways to automate with maximum payoff or experiential learning in how intelligent platforms can create unprecedented capabilities, Confluence captures it all in a choice of experiences that delegates can then pick and choose from to build out their own personal Confluence. It offers the perfect platform for problem-finding, for people to ask why, and why not, even as it brings together client leaders, academicians, influencers and the who's who of the world of technology and business for three days of looking, learning, sharing and improving.

For us, it is a huge opportunity to bring home the value of the amazing work we do for clients - the Infosys technology that flies planes, that makes drugs safer, that assures parents that their teens are driving cars safely, and in ways little and large making our world a better place to be. Better still, Confluence will create forums for all of us to learn from each other, to build new and renew old relationships, to outline our vision for our own business and our clients', based on innovation, automation and lifelong learning, and thus deliver the promise of brand Infosys.

"It'll never happen. Not in a thousand years."

That was the general response in the United States when Henry Ford began marketing his Model T to the masses. The reason there were naysayers: To accommodate a horseless carriage, the country would have to build a massive network of paved roadways and have refueling stations in almost every town. Think about it: Every town in America with a place where a driver could refill the tank of his automobile with gasoline?

Competitive pressures have intensified to the point where the average lifespan of a company in the S&P 500 has dropped to just 18 years today from more than 60 years in 1958. If that rate of change continues, 75 percent of the companies in today's S&P 500 will be gone and replaced by new ones by 2030.

How to remain on that list for more than just 18 years? The key is to leverage technology to compete and stay one step ahead in this rapidly changing landscape. The most stunning example of this radical change is the shake-up expected in the automobile and transportation sector. I suspect the evolution will continue to favor services businesses over products. For example, consider the rise of Über and Lyft that use technology to change the way transportation services are delivered. Add to that the potential of self-driving cars by Tesla and Google, managed and controlled with software upgrades. The Dutch tested a self-driving bus couple of weeks ago. To stay relevant (or survive), the automobile industry is looking at unique investments. General Motors invested US$ 500 million in Lyft, and FordPass is a wonderful display of a century-old auto company's foray into mobility services.

Infosys in the strategic partner for global TEDx Anchor Program

Think about the history of mankind. Every forward step that man has ever taken in his journey on this planet - be it the invention of the wheel, the evolution of modern medicine, the building of the printing press - has all happened because of an idea. An idea that was born in the mind of one individual, but which didn't just stay there, because it was shared and brought to life by several others who improved on it to create new solutions and open up new opportunities.

Today, the power of shared ideas is more compelling than ever before.

This week, our leaders across the world gathered in our Bangalore campus to reflect on the last three months, and chart the way forward for the toughest quarter ahead. When we were not talking numbers (we just announced our third quarter results after all!), one thing was evident - we are doing something fundamentally right. The highlight being the Zero Distance movement within the company, which was implemented six months ago.

Over the last few quarters, we have been working very hard to bring innovation to every project and, in the process, harness a culture of innovation among our 180,000+ strong employee base. It hasn't been easy. But, we are finally beginning to see the rewards. Today, 90% of our delivery organization can proudly say that they have done something innovative in an existing project, beyond the scope of work. And when 90% of our delivery organization vouches for this, we are talking about approximately 8,000 projects. I couldn't be more proud of the incredible effort and enthusiasm of Infoscions behind this high-impact movement.

The movie Tomorrowland is getting mixed reviews. Some critics say that despite its spectacular special effects, it lacks a coherent storyline. Others have a different take. One critic writes that: "Tomorrowland delivers a loud and clear message of hope for humanity, which is a welcome thing to hear at any point in time."

Well that is good news - especially for those of us in the business of innovation. There's nothing more satisfying for me than to help solve the challenges facing the world from the perspective of the life sciences. That's because the assorted life science industries - everything from Big Pharma and biotech to healthcare - are undergoing a tremendous and exciting evolution. Because of the power of Big Data, they're consolidating into one, massive force for good.

The world has been a troubling place lately. I don't need to go into the details if you've read even one newspaper or watched a newscast on the web or TV during the last week. But, as they say, it's always darkest right before the dawn.

It's in that spirit that the world's business, political, and cultural leaders will converge on a quaint Swiss town of Davos this week to discuss how they can, collectively, improve the state of the world. That's been the World Economic Forum's slogan for decades now, and its prestige as a conclave of problem-solvers increases every year. This year, among the many challenges and issues its attendees will be discussing, is innovation and how best to incubate it.