Besieged by baseless personal attacks: Vishal Sikka on quitting Infosys

Mumbai: Vishal Sikka has put in his papers as the CEO and MD of Infosys, the company announced on Friday morning.

Ending his three-year long stint as the chief, Sikka will continue as the Executive Vice Chairman of the company. U B Pravin Rao will step in as the interim CEO and MD.

Although Sikka's tenure at the company had recently been battling a lot of criticisim, his resignation comes as a shock to many. While many have been wondering why he resigned at such a crucial stage, Sikka's resignation letter gives us a glimpse into the personal attacks he had been facing as the top boss.

Dear Board Colleagues,

Over the last few days, since our earlier call, I've met Sesh several times, talked to you individually at length, and spent time thinking things thru with Vandana.

During this time, one of our employees, Sandeep Karamongikar, died in his sleep, likely of a massive heart attack. He was working on the chatbot frontend in Nia. Also over the weekend, in possibly the greatest demonstration of AI capability ever, a bot built by the researchers at OpenAI (yes, that OpenAI), defeated the world's best players of DOTA2, a multiplayer online video game, a game where the bot learned to play entirely from scratch. Further demonstrating that the force to automate routine, even advanced, activities is an unstoppable and exponential one.

And the Charlottesville incident here in the US demonstrated once again the power of words and silences to cause real damage, or to heal.

After much reflection, I have concluded that it is indeed time for me to leave my current positions as MD and CEO, and I have communicated my resignation to Sesh.

I will be working closely with Sesh, Ravi, Pravin, with all of you, and the senior management team to plan out the details and



the timelines to ensure a smooth transition and in the meantime, continue our work without disruption, and ensuring that we protect our company, the employees, the clients, and the interests of every shareholder. You can count on my commitment to this.

I came here to help navigate the company through what I saw as a massive transformation opportunity, to transform our company and restore strong profitable growth, as well as help transform the business of our customers. I came to do this with the power of technology, given my experiences with similar transformations, my background in AI, and the structural changes that I saw happening in the IT services industry.

This needed new skills, new thinking, new initiatives, and a transformation in the culture, from a cost-oriented value delivery, to entrepreneurship oriented value delivery. You have heard me articulate this many times before.

This type of a transformation has always been a passion for me, indeed I took this job for this reason.

We have achieved much in the last 3 years, and for sure we can all be proud of the powerful seeds of transformation that have already been sowed. No one anticipated the additional headwinds like the geo-political disruptions (Brexit, Trump, visa etc.) that made this transformation even more challenging, but also rewarding.

But, the distractions that we have seen, the constant drumbeat of the same issues over and over again, while ignoring and undermining the good work that has been done, take the excitement and passion out of this amazing journey. Over the last many months and quarters, we have all been besieged by false, baseless, malicious and increasingly personal attacks. Allegations that have been repeatedly proven false and baseless by multiple, independent investigations.