Infosys, India’s one of the leading IT service and support providers, is now planning to hire about 10,000 Americans over the period of next two years. The company is planning to employ U.S workers in the field of artificial intelligence, reports Bloomberg.
The company, which presently employs more than 200,000 people around the world, will expand its local hiring in the U.S. It plans to add four new hubs dedicated to research technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning as well.
Infosys has said that the first such hub will open in Indiana in August 2017 and is expected to create 2,000 jobs for American workers by 2021.
This move comes following criticism from the Trump administration that outsourcing firms are unfairly taking jobs away from U.S workers. Infosys, along with other such Indian firms — Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro have become political targets in the U.S for allegedly displacing their workers’ jobs by flying in foreigners on temporary visas.
The IT service firms rely heavily on the H-1B visa program, which U.S. President Donald Trump has now ordered federal agencies to review. Last month, he signed an executive order aimed at overhauling H-1B work visa programs. With regards to the same, Infosys’ Chief Executive Officer Vishal Sikka said:
In the fast-changing world of today, we need the ability to be local. We need to be trusted by our customers as being local. To work with a mix of global and local talent is absolutely the right thing to do.
Many Indian outsourcing firms have recruited employees in the United States but Infosys is the first one to come out with concrete hiring numbers and provide a timeline.
A report suggests that last month, Infosys was applying for just under 1,000 H-1B visas this year. This is a significant downfall from about 6,500 applications in 2016 and some 9,000 in 2015.
Indian politicians and several IT industry heads have been lobbying U.S. lawmakers and officials to not make drastic changes to visa rules, as this could hurt India’s massive $150 billion IT service sector.
While Infosys has announced its plans to hire 10,000 US workers, it has not disclosed the financial impact of its plans. It has also not cleared if the planned U.S. jobs would account for a large percentage of overall hiring in the coming two years.
Last month, the company warned that it would struggle to reach its ambitious $20 billion revenue target by 2020, as the Indian software service sector has been hit by cautious client spending due to a rising protectionist wave globally.
