Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka took an unusual chariot to his quarterly earnings conference this week: arriving in a driverless golf cart built by staff engineers in India.
The move was meant to showcase the company’s advancements in automation technology and artificial intelligence and help Infosys’s younger engineers experiment with building automation technologies, which Sikka said is seeping into every industry, including sports.
“It’s all about innovation,” Sikka said in an interview with India’s NDTV. “The future and how that’s transforming businesses in every industry, it’s all about innovation.”
What do our presidents do to have fun on campus? You may find them testing the autonomous golf carts built by our engineering services team. pic.twitter.com/UJ6v9xXW7m
— Infosys (@Infosys) July 13, 2017
The golf cart, built in conjunction with the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi using open source technology, isn’t the first time Infosys has ventured into sports.
The company has long provided data services to the tennis industry, having renewed its partnership last year with the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) to provide analytical services about player performance and statistics in an effort to better engage fans. It first ventured into tennis early in 2015.
Also in 2015, Infosys made a $3 million investment in sports wearable company WHOOP, which earlier this year struck a deal to become the “officially licensed recovery wearable” of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA). The deal, which marked the first time a players association in professional sports partnered with a wearable technology company, enables NFL players to easily access, take ownership and commercialize their personal health data.
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Autonomous golf carts themselves, however, are nothing new. Some of the earliest cases of robotic golf carts can be traced to 2015, when the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) used them to ferry attendees around intelligent robotics conference.