Infosys CMO Sumit Virmani Finds the Human Side of AI

In the not-so-distant past, a business-focused technology company could slap its logo onto a stadium, vehicle or athlete in a tech-savvy sport and connect its brand and products to the action. Since the introduction of Generative AI within the last year, however, firms like Bangalore-based Infosys increasingly have to use those partnerships as B2B demos for their products’ capabilities. Before this year’s US Open, for example, Infosys used a campaign from WPP-owned design agency partner AKQA to announce partnerships with multi-time Grand Slam champions Rafael Nadal and Iga Swiatek, with each player using Infosys AI-powered analytics from live matches and historical data to improve their training and focus their match strategy. “Although tennis and technology may seem quite different at first, there’s so much in common—including strategic thinking, learning and developing in every situation, the ability to evolve your game, and adjust,” Swiatek said. Tennis champions Rafael Nadal and Iga Świątek serve as case studies for Infosys AI. Infosys has already spent the better part of a decade working with the ATP Tour, Roland-Garros, the Australian Open and The International Tennis Hall of Fame. Infosys has used its Cobalt cloud services to help predict wins, while implementing its recently debuted Topaz AI platform to provide commentary, coverage and video for the events. While Infosys has provided similar services for Madison Square Garden, it has also entered partnerships with the Financial Times, The Economist and Bloomberg to use its technology to enhance their reporting. It’s also teamed with MIT to make its Cobalt cloud product less daunting for businesses. Infosys CMO Sumit Virmani has watched the company’s brand value grow 84% since 2020 to nearly $13 billion today. He spoke with Adweek about Infosys’ partnerships, its focus on AI and how showing its technology in action has made its business-to-business life easier. Adweek: How has Generative AI and products like Topaz affected recent Infosys marketing?Sumit Virmani: We have been leveraging AI in a material way for a very long time. Some of the work on the marketing side we do with our global partnerships, with tennis being a great example of that. If you were to see the experience of the billion tennis fans around the world, it's suddenly become a lot more immersive thanks to AI. Whether it's AI-driven commentary, AI-powered highlights or massive analysis of reams of data across years to give players and coaches the intelligence to be able to prepare, AI has been leveraged in the sport in a very big way. IBM Uses the US Open to Pitch Watsonx to Consumers and Bring AI to the Masses Today, there is an AI assistant that is built into the learning app that is available to all our Infosys folks. The personalized AI assistant guides you and says “OK, this is what you have done already, but this is possibly the next interesting capability that your peers are learning that will position you well for the future.” That's just one example of how we are bringing AI deep into the fabric of the organization while making it available for clients to be able to accelerate their journey. How has tennis helped Infosys marketers illustrate the company’s AI capabilities?For the journalists who are hard at work trying to report on the rapid pace of the action that's happening around Roland-Garros, Infosys AI is helping them create automated stories of what happened in the last match—providing an aid to work on and fine tune before you go out and publish it to the world. A billion fans experience the Grand Slam around the world, but very few have an opportunity to actually walk into the stadium and join in the excitement of the game or possibly watch live [broadcasts] of every match across the tournament. But they're constantly consuming content on their devices. How can we make the device experience insightful? Google’s New GenAI Marketing Tools Speed Up Campaign Planning and Buying If you want to get a sense of how a specific match played out, what were the ups and downs, what was the trajectory of the ball, what was the spin involved—all of that, in a very visually enhanced way, is available to these fans. [With] AI highlights, it just takes a few minutes for an AI engine to convert the entire set … and create an automated AI highlight package that can be used by a broadcaster to push it across any of the channels at the click of a button. We've made video-powered AI-driven analytics available within the ATP app itself, so it's not accessible only to the top players in the world who can afford to spend on that level of analysis. It's actually democratized to all the players across the tour who can just go on to the app and customize the content if they want to see how they compete against a specific player. We have a lot of our clients who are witnessing that capability in action at Roland-Garros, while they're consuming this, it ends up becoming a very credible and powerful story of an AI use case in action. With these events functioning as testing grounds for Infosys technology that white papers and case studies can’t provide, how important have they become for marketing products to clients?When we decided to venture into partnerships and sponsorships about seven or eight years ago, we were very clear that we are not in the business of brand slapping. We are in the business of only getting into partnerships where we can use the capability of Infosys to credibly enhance the experience of the partnership for its stakeholders. Whether it’s the ATP and what we do for the tennis community, whether it's Madison Square Garden and what we do for the stadium or for the Knicks and the Rangers, whether it's partnerships with the big publications around the world—The Economist, the Financial Times, Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal—each and every one of these partnerships have been designed with the intent that they end up becoming platforms to showcase the Infosys brand. Snapchat Rolls Out GenAI Selfie Feature, Dreams But more importantly, they become great platforms to showcase the future Infosys capability in action and to realize the Infosys promise of navigating the next. At the end of the day, we are going to help each of these partners discover and realize their “next” by leveraging the Infosys tech. Your partnerships tend to focus on higher-end events and publications. Did Infosys AI learn something about the company’s intended marketing audience, or is another strategy at work?In this case, possibly, human intelligence trumped artificial intelligence early on. What informed our strategy were three different pillars. One was the decision makers of our business, the profile of those decision makers of our business, where they tend to gravitate and what they get excited by. The kind of publications we have chosen are the ones that are read by the C-suite actively to consume information. The second dimension of our choice was the market. About 85% or 90% of our business comes from the U.S. and Europe and therefore it was important to be able to handpick partnerships that have an opportunity for us to be actively present, and activate platforms in these markets to be able to connect with a target group we cared about. Amazon’s Generative AI Investment Is Bigger Than You Think The third dimension was to deliberately choose partnerships which have an always-on dimension to their presence and not a flash-in-the-pan approach. Tennis is a sport that covers all markets, starts in January and goes on all the way into the vertical. When you look at Madison Square Garden, it's activated across the year. You look at the four publications, and they focus on our markets, our target group, activated across the year. The other one I didn’t mention was what we do with MIT. The idea simply was that there's so much chaos around the cloud globally, and people are looking for answers on how to really leverage the cloud to their advantage. We set up this platform called “Cloud Chaos to Clarity.” The idea simply was that [by using] MIT's deep research capabilities and our capabilities on practically executing cloud capabilities for our client, how can we actually create a destination that provides adequate insight and adequate learning for the community at large? So that's what MIT and Infosys have been doing under the banner of Cobalt and is now in its third year.

B2B

Infosys' B2B Marketing Strives to Find the Human Side of AI

The tech marketer partners with the French Open, Financial Times and MIT to illustrate the future of his company’s offerings

Jason Notte

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