New Delhi, April 28 -- It is earnings season again, that wonderful fortnight when corporate leaders use soaring prose to describe uneven performances. Last week alone offered a taste of the genre with artificial intelligence (AI) as the recurring theme. It shone bright in press releases, analyst calls, leadership speeches, and, for good measure, TV ads.

Indeed, AI is the perfect smokescreen: it smacks of the future, costs nothing to mention, and requires no proof until about 2036. With this, AI joins an honoured list of corporate lingua francas-from synergy in the nineties to disruption, followed by pivot.

Thus, it was AI that Infosys Ltd.'s CEO turned to when talking about how the IT firm's 3.1% revenue growth in FY26 reflected "the ro...