Infosysis a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting with over 30 years of experience managing global enterprise systems. The firm works to empower businesses with agile digital scale and helps customers in over 50 countries navigate digital transformation.

Infosys is an AI thought leader with an analytics and AI-powered core competency that prioritizes value realization and business transformation. The firm has worked with customers across multiple industries, including manufacturing, retail, healthcare, finance, oil and gas, and more to uncover how analytics, AI, and machine learning (ML) can solve specific business challenges.

A close collaborator with Microsoft for 25 years, Infosys is a recognized global leader in implementing Microsoft cloud technologies powered by Infosys Cobalt. Infosys relies on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform for its marquee AI and ML use cases. Microsoft offerings in this space represent a strategic edge for Infosys customers.

Using Azure services to change the game

Infosys created a transformative solution to help a leading global food and beverage company determine competitor product recipes, a key part of competitive intelligence. Traditionally, the customer relied on food labs to determine the makeup of competitor products, an expensive and time-consuming process. Using Azure ML, Infosys developed ML models that automatically reverse-engineer product formulations using publicly available information, such as nutrition data and labels.

Infosys also integrated market-share information in the framework to prioritize data on competitors’ products. The model shows which recipes the company should make a priority, based on the impact of recipe changes or new recipe releases.

This solution was built on Azure Machine Learning, which simplifies and automates ML management. The Azure service enables Infosys to try several different models, keep track of successes and failures, and find patterns across various experiments.

Azure ML provides libraries that helped Infosys build, train, refresh, and publish the ML models. These libraries feature out-of-the-box functionality, cutting down on the amount of code that the Infosys team needed to write.

Infosys also used Azure data solutions for this project, including Data Lake Storage. Infosys was able to load huge datasets using ML workspaces, increasing confidence in the results.

Infosys deployed Azure Data Factories (ADF) for serverless data integration and to move data between the original source and ML workspaces. This allowed business users to schedule the ML process through a simple file drop operation into a network-shared folder, without the need to rely on data scientists or analysts.

The customer realized several immediate benefits from the Infosys solution. Now, it can:

• Track competitors on a near real-time basis in terms of cost, product composition, and variety of recipes
• Complete investigations in hours, at 80 percent accuracy, versus six months previously
• Continuously benchmark against more than 200 competitors, versus only a few top competitors previously

The customer has also expanded the consumption of insights to other groups across the company and is looking to grow this capability in other regions in addition to the U.S.

The Infosys solution has the potential to disrupt food testing R&D globally, with wide applicability across product categories in the packaged food industry.

Implementing solutions across many industries

Infosys has worked with customers across multiple industries to uncover how analytics and AI can solve specific business issues. For example:

For a paper manufacturer based in Finland with a global B2B clientele, Infosys designed and implemented a fully integrated machine learning application to automate the process of adjudicating claims for customer credits and refunds. The turnkey solution, integrating on-premises ERP and a pipeline in Microsoft Azure for scoring claims, was built in just 2.5 months, the value of the platform architecture made evident in the speed of delivery.

An international bank with headquarters in the Netherlands had vast amounts of data and multiple use cases for which it needed solutions. Identifying the correct datasets and making them available in a self-service fashion was complicated by the strict regulatory, privacy, and security constraints under which the bank operates. Infosys enabled analytics, AI, and ML to provide access to the data and analysis in areas including finance and risk management.

A leading manufacturer of gypsum-based plasterboard and ceiling lining systems engaged Infosys to rationalize and integrate disparate systems in the 12 countries in which it does business. The firm’s solution on the Azure Cortana Analytics stack, comprising a global BI platform, data lake, and data warehouse, provides for the first time standardized, granular data on business processes and financials from all geographies for the CFO and CEO to make strategic business decisions.

“Microsoft and Infosys’ growing analytics and AI partnership is focused on empowering customers across industries to address changing market trends and accelerate digital transformation,” says Simran Sachar, Analytics and AI Director at Microsoft. “Together we are bringing Microsoft’s industry-leading engineering and Infosys’ delivery capabilities to help customers realize superior business value through next-generation digital technology and innovation around cloud, data, analytics, and AI.”

Great expectations for future success

Infosys’ recent focus has been on making customers analytics and AI-ready. This involves modernizing their data landscapes and enabling them with analytics-based implementations powered by the nimble Microsoft Azure data platform.

Going forward, the firm’s goal is to scale its efforts, increase efficiency, and make its customers digitally native, AI-driven enterprises. A corresponding initiative involves Infosys strengthening the proficiencies of its own workforce in cloud, analytics, and AI on Microsoft Azure.

Infosys will rely on its partnership with Microsoft and leverage the capability gravity of Azure to grow its practices in both data engineering and analytics and AI. The firm will increase its portfolio of products and solutions and will deliver them through its own channels and through opportunities afforded by Infosys’ partnership with Microsoft, including the Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource.

Infosys leadership has “great expectations” for the firm’s relationship with Microsoft to result in additional opportunities for co-creation, (e.g., joint hackathons as a new area of customer engagement), and to produce meaningful growth and mutual success.