However, Mr Rao said Infosys had so far made nobody redundant because of automation, rather it had "relieved" 11,000 people last year from manual, repetitive tasks in service linessuch as testing, application development, maintenance and infrastructure management, and redeployed them to jobs requiring more creativity and imagination, such as user experience design.

Infosys launched its first artificial intelligence platform, Mana, last year and Mr Rao said it had already reduced the number of humans required at the company's support desks.

New AI platform

"A big proportion of the tickets are for routine stuff, where 99 per cent of the time it's the same solution, so that's been the low-hanging fruit in terms of automation," Mr Rao said.

The next-generation AI platform, Nia, was released in April amid claims it can assist with more complex business problems, such as forecasting revenues and what products need to be built, understanding customer behaviour, deeply understanding the content of contracts and legal documents, understanding compliance, and fraud.

Infosys was moving its people further up the value chain too, Mr Rao said. Since October 2014 it has trained 140,000 of its 200,000 staff in design thinking – a problem-solving strategy – at its corporate university in south-western India, and Mr Rao said a more sophisticated level of consulting had resulted.

"We had a large consumer goods client in the UK, four quarters in a row they could not close their books within five days," he said.

"In the past we might have looked at a downstream solution for why their month-end closing programs were failing, they might have ended up spending $30 million on a new package. Instead we were able to put a team on this and find it was data quality issues upstream that were the culprit, so we built a dashboard identifying these and enabling data inputs to be cleaned up in almost real time."

The dashboard has since been built in to a product, HawkEye, which Mr Rao said had clients around the world.

Even though Infosys was not hiring at the rate it once was, Mr Rao said such creativity would always ensure the world created enough jobs for most of its population.

"Things get automated and we move on to new things, it's been happening for all of human history," he said.