Corporate thought-leader and Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy has flayed the high wage hikes that senior managements have been apportioning to themselves when the software industry is in trying times and has advised them to make “sacrifices” to maintain the common man’s faith in capitalism.

Conceding that times are difficult for the IT services sector, Murthy dismissed the commonly attributed threats of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation as “more hype than reality”.

Terming the trend of no hikes for juniors and freshers as “worrisome,” Murthy rued that the senior level people have been taking handsome hikes.

“I think that is not the way to make capitalism acceptable to the larger masses in a country that has huge poverty,” he said, speaking at IIT-Bombay over the weekend.

He said the IT sector is passing through a trough that is cyclical in nature and may occur once a few years.

Global clients

One of the reasons for this is the investments in IT done by the developed world clients in the past, he said, adding they are waiting to reap the benefits of the same before starting to invest again. However, he dismissed the change in the technological landscape where automation and AI are said to be making deeper inroads.

“There is this whole thing about automation and AI. That is much more hype than the reality, at least in software services,” Murthy said.

Many industry reports had in the past highlighted a steep decline in hiring in the software space primarily because of automation, which has been eating up tens of thousands of human jobs annually.

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