Infineon accelerates digitalization strategy with Low-Code and launches GenAI app

Challenge

Assisting IT in its journey to support the Business

If you’ve ever used an e-car, e-bike, or any household appliance, chances are you’ve used Infineon’s semiconductors.

Infineon designs, develops, manufactures, and markets a broad range of semiconductors and semiconductor-based solutions, focusing on key markets in the automotive, industrial, and consumer sectors. Its products range from standard components to special components for digital, analog, and mixed-signal applications, all the way to customer-specific solutions and the appropriate software.

As a critical company helping the world go digital, Infineon adopted digital transformation as one of its core pillars. But even with a large IT team, Infineon was no stranger to typical development challenges.

“Sometimes provisioning of solutions needs to be fast. It is crucial that we keep up with the business needs, and accelerate the alignments between business and IT,” Cornelia Wood, Head of Low-Code at Infineon, explained.

But the backlog was only part of the journey. Infineon also knew there could be a better way to maintain legacy technology, reducing costs and security risks and freeing up senior developers to deliver business value. Another challenge Infineon and the whole industry faces is the competitive market for senior developers.

So, the company set off to find a development alternative that would boost developers’ productivity and improve collaboration between business and IT.

Solution

2 Weeks. 1 Developer. GenAI. Go.

Infineon needed a development solution that allowed the semiconductors’ manufacturer to address these opportunities from two fronts:

• Enabling senior developers to speed up development while also allowing them to add written code as needed;
• Empowering business technology users — non-professional developers with knowledge of automation, scripting, and software — to create smaller efficiency apps with the guidance of IT.

Infineon chose OutSystems.

In the first six months of its low-code journey, Infineon established a Center of Excellence (CoE) team to set the guardrails and ensure proper development governance.

The CoE team intakes app ideas and evaluates if they’re a good fit for low-code. They also offer features, components, training, and manage integrations to support both IT and non-IT development teams in building applications, ranging from complex to simple, respectively.

In the first two years, Infineon delivered over 100 applications and has about 200 under development.

One of the apps that went live is an internal corporate chatbot—a ChatGPT-like app—that one developer built in less than three weeks. This generative AI solution, accessible to all Infineon employees, integrates with ChatGPT and internal LLM (Large Language Models). Since the initial MVP the team continuously added new features like streaming, different prompt types or document upload. The goal is to provide a controlled and secure way to use GenAI tools without the potential security risks associated with open solutions.

Results

More agility, less shadow IT

Infineon’s CoE is globally distributed and plans to grow in the future. The team supports around 200 developers creating applications on the OutSystems low-code platform.

The biggest benefit of this federated development model is a new kind of agility. On the one hand, professional developers can accelerate their output and focus on delivering and enhancing critical applications. “Today, we have a curated low-code backlog that the team is looking at monthly,” Walter Nirschl, Global Head of IT Workplace Services explained. “Almost every week we’re releasing new features.”

On the other hand, business users can build the small applications they need to work more efficiently, such as an approval process app, which IT might not have prioritized against other more critical solutions.

Most applications Infineon has launched help the company automate business processes and the impact on employee productivity so far has been great. Low-code solutions have saved working hours, manual effort, license costs and contribute to Infineon’s digital transformation journey.