Infosys’ EdgeVerve Ups AI Ante With New PolarisEdge

‘[PolarisEdge] is an AI platform that helps enterprises extract maximum value from the digital core investment by bridging people, process, data, and technology silos. … Today, PolarisEdge, because of how it has evolved, is powering over 100,000 digital workers right now worldwide,’ says Sateesh Seetharamiah, CEO of Edge Platforms at EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infosys.

Big Focus On AI

Infosys Ltd. Is a huge Bangalore, India-based multinational provider of business consulting, IT, and outsourcing services with a worldwide employee count of over 320,000. Nestled within that behemoth is EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary with 5,000-plus employees that’s focused on AI, automation, and analytics to help enterprises with their digital transformation initiatives.

Sateesh Seetharamiah, CEO of Edge Platforms at EdgeVerve, told CRN that his organization was foundeedd to engineer world-class digital platforms that help organizations become connected enterprises, including leveraging AI, automation, or data-related capabilities.

The company has launched multiple platforms that use AI to help businesses with their digital transformation, including platforms for supply chain collaboration, automation and robotic process automation, and extracting data from complex documentation, Seetharamiah said.

This month the company launched its latest platform, PolarisEdge, an AI platform that helps enterprises maximize the value of their digital core investments by bridging people, process, data, and technology silos.

“Today, PolarisEdge, because of how it has evolved, is powering over 100,000 digital workers right now worldwide,” he said. “It has automated close to 10,000 processes and is digitizing right now around a million complex documents. So it is a platform that is delivering value to some extent. And all of this is powered by AI capability.”

PolarisEdge, and EdgeVerve’s other AI-powered platforms, were made possible by dedicating Infosys resources specifically for such projects, Seetharamiah said.

“We have made quite a bit of investment in the last 18 months to build towards this, leveraging some of the things that we had and repurposing some of the things that we had built out earlier,” he said. “But a good part of this has been new investments that we've brought in because to really drive this kind of end-to-end seamless integration is a very different value proposition that we're tackling.”

There’s a lot going on within Infosys’ EdgeVerve business. The following is an edited edition of CRN’s interview with Seetharamiah. For more details about the organization and its AI focus, read on.

Define EdgeVerve

We are a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infosys Limited. We've been in business for the last nine years. The sole purpose for which we were founded was to engineer world-class digital platforms that help organizations become connected enterprises, including leveraging AI, automation, or data-related capabilities. We have engineered and launched various platforms over these nine years.

[For example], one of the platforms that we have is TradeEdge. This is basically a platform helping supply chain collaboration and driving new visibility into the supply chain. And today all the top 30 CPG [consumer packaged goods] brands are leveraging it. We have around $250 billion of trade flowing through this platform. And it's the largest demand-sensing network that exists in the world, allowing CPG companies to get visibility right into their retail execution to provide them visibility into the demand creation that is happening downstream. This is also a peer-to-peer networking platform. Today this platform has over 2.5 million parties on this network who are transacting and sharing information and data.

Another platform is called AssistEdge. And this is focused primarily around automation. We've done some remarkable work leveraging AssistEdge, which has been rated and ranked as a leading automation platform by all the analysts over the years. With AssistEdge, we're servicing many large retailers and enterprises around the world across multiple industries and geographies. Some of the largest automation programs that run in the world today are actually on AssistEdge. It includes RPA [robotic process automation] but does much more than RPA.

Across these platforms, we also have a document digitization platform called XtractEdge, which helps digitization of complex documents. It’s one of our most recent platforms.

And across all these platforms, we leverage AI extensively. As I mentioned, our customer portfolio spans across all major industry segments and all geographies. And we've been fortunate to work with close to 400 large enterprises worldwide.

Why did Infosys set up EdgeVerve as a separate company with its own sales force rather than make the platform part of Infosys’ core business?

It needs a very different discipline and focus and practices compared to a services organization. That was the motivational factor. And also, the talent necessary to engineer digital platforms is different. So for a whole host of reasons, and also, from a branding and positioning perspective, all this was part of the consideration when EdgeVerve was established [in 2014].

What we have seen working with all these large clients over the years, and especially now with the emergence of GenAI and traditional AI, has accelerated the thinking we've had for quite some time. We've been involved with AI for a very long time. We were one of the first companies to launch an AI platform in 2015 focused on the IT operations side. And ever since we have been involved in many innovations around AI. We've seen enterprises [that] have invested heavily in building their digital core, which runs their core operations. But as they have been doing that, while they have been able to drive the level of automation and efficiency around it and building best practices, we also saw that this has created data silos in enterprises. And we also see process fragmentation because of the various different enterprises and their journeys and their customer journeys cutting across multiple enterprises. We're also seeing organizational silos.

So while digital core investment has served certain needs of the large enterprises, it also has in itself created certain challenges which can hinder organizations’ ability to really take on AI. And so that was a trigger point for us to say, ‘Okay, how would enterprises really deal with this particular opportunity and problem and drive agility and the next level of issue efficiency?’ That led us to realize that large enterprises really need a digital edge, an augmented digital core, a transformation overlay which sits on top of the digital core which will drive the next order of efficiency and effectiveness. Reworking the digital core is not only expensive but also risky. So that was the trigger point. That's the positioning of our new platform called PolarisEdge.

What is PolarisEdge?

It is an AI platform that helps enterprises extract maximum value from the digital core investment by bridging people, process, data, and technology silos. PolarisEdge does this without necessarily disrupting businesses’ investments in their digital cores. That's very important.

Today, PolarisEdge, because of how it has evolved, is powering over 100,000 digital workers right now worldwide. It has automated close to 10,000 processes and is digitizing right now around a million complex documents. So it is a platform that is delivering value to some extent. And all of this is powered by AI capability. Those are all customer numbers, aggregated, obviously.

There are several value levers for PolarisEdge. One is the bridging of data, process, and organizational silos. Second is, by doing so, PolarisEdge will power a lot of straight-through processing on these digital core platforms. Another way to say that is end-to-end automation. This will include multiple systems, multiple organizations, et cetera, all brought together to drive end-to-end automation.

The third lever of PolarisEdge is, it creates a fabric on top of the digital core which will drive contextual artificial intelligence. That’s a very, very important distinction because with so many data silos it's very important to aggregate these silos to actually take insights from multiple organizations. PolarisEdge enables that fabric to sit on top of the digital core to provide that contextual AI. And by using this AI, companies can also augment human thinking and amplify human potential.

Another lever is around connecting processes from multiple parties in an enterprise ecosystem. PolarisEdge harnesses the power of the ecosystem where it connects multiple parties together and enables a seamless interaction and data exchange between multiple enterprises. Last, but not least, PolarisEdge will actually help amplify some of the return [on] businesses’ digital core investment.

So these are the core value propositions on which PolarisEdge is positioned and is getting launched. They are essentially around three things: To unlock efficiencies of scale, amplifying human potential through AI, and harnessing the power of a connected ecosystem by bringing the entire ecosystem together rather than working in silos as an enterprise by yourself.

Does EdgeVerve have a separate salesforce from Infosys?

Yes, it does. We're operating in all the major regions: North America, Europe, U.K., and APAC [Asia Pacific], including Australia and New Zealand. So it has a worldwide spread. And a significant part of our business, close to 60 percent of that, comes from the Americas.

Is PolarisEdge just based on new investments by EdgeVerve or primarily on things that EdgeVerve has been doing with AI across its other platforms?

It is a combination of things. We have made quite a bit of investment in the last 18 months to build towards this, leveraging some of the things that we had and repurposing some of the things that we had built out earlier. But a good part of this has been new investments that we've brought in because to really drive this kind of end-to-end seamless integration is a very different value proposition that we're tackling. So a new platform and new investments will also come to play.

How big is EdgeVerve in terms of revenue and people?

Revenue, we don't necessarily disclose. It's part of the overall digital platform business. But people-wise, EdgeVerve has over 5,000. There is an engineering organization, which is primarily based in India, which does all the engineering. And there is a sales organization, which is global in nature [and] includes sales and our GTM [go-to-market organization including solution consulting. Then we have our services, implementation and support organization, which also is global in nature.