Since former SAP SE chief technology officer Vishal Sikka took over the reins two years ago, Infosys Ltd. has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in assembling a software portfolio to complement its main outsourcing business. The latest fruit of the vendor’s efforts is a machine learning platform that launched yesterday with the aim of helping organizations automate their everyday operations.

Mana, as the offering is called, consists of three main components. The first is an open-source business intelligence application referred to the Infosys Information Platform that enables a  company’s analysts to aggregate data about the parts of its business in need of streamlining. From there, they can prepare the records for processing and then run them through the machine learning engine at the heart of Mana, which constitutes its second major piece-part. According to Infosys, the software is capable of turning the raw input into useful information on how to speed up operational procedures and improve the productivity of workers.

The outsourcing giant didn’t divulge any more details, but based on what we know about other complex artificial intelligence platforms like IBM Corp.’s Watson, it’s a safe bet that the machine learning engine can’t look for such information on its own. In other words, it probably takes a human operator (or a team of them) to configure the software for the use case that it’s being used to automate. That means Mana is poised to kill two birds with one stone and not only create a new source of software revenue for Infosys but also boost its professional services arm in the process. After all, most organizations don’t exactly have a team of in-house machine experts on call for such undertakings.

Many clients will likely also draw upon the firm’s assistance with handling the third and final component of Mana, which helps translate the knowledge produced by its machine learning engine into a form that can be applied to an organization’s infrastructure. Such multi-stage technology projects tend to take a considerable amount of time to complete, but Infosys boasts that several early adopters have nonetheless  already reached the production stage.

One unnamed international telco is using the platform to automate subscription processing, while a major food and beverage company has implemented Mana in its call center to help answer commonly asked questions. And lastly, Infosys says that an enterprise with a large field service operation was able to improve the productivity of its technicians by 50 percent since adopting the machine learning platform.

Image via Geralt