Infosys chair says AI must clean up legacy systems ASAP

Software 6 Infosys chair says AI will clean up legacy systems – then make more of them 6 PLUS: China’s sword-wielding humanoid robots; Australian court swamped by AI filings; Vietnam’s 25km overwater drone delivery; And more! Simon Sharwood Mon 23 Feb 2026 // 04:13 UTC Asia In Brief Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani has said the advent of AI means organizations no longer have any excuse to retain their legacy systems. Speaking at Infosys AI Day last week, Nilekani said AI is changing the very nature of work, and used software development as his example. “Talent will have to deal with a world where writing code will not be the goal. It will be actually making AI work – orchestration and those kinds of things,” he said. But the chair said making AI work means getting rid of legacy systems. “Many large companies are spending 60 to 80 percent of their IT spend on maintaining systems,” Nilekani said. “If you really want a firm to take advantage of AI, you have to fundamentally clean this up.” “But the good news is, for the first time, because of AI, we have the tools now to do modernization … very quickly and in a much more economic way. So we have a huge demand, and we have the ability now to do it,” he said. But he warned AI will also make more legacy systems. “The very fact that you can generate stuff means you can generate slop. In fact, five years from now, there’ll be more AI legacy systems than any other legacy system – all the kind of stuff that will have been generated ...