The recent partnerships between Indian IT services and global AI players reflect how the former are looking to reinvent and reposition themselves to contend with rapidly evolving technology. This is a shift in the technical and delivery models that the industry has so far operated on, analysts said. The collaborations span compute infrastructure, foundation models and enterprise AI platforms.
On Monday, TCS announced a collaboration with AMD to co-develop rack-scale AI infrastructure based on the Helios platform, aimed at enabling large-scale enterprise and sovereign AI deployments in India. Infosys, followed on Tuesday, announcing it has partnered Anthropic to combine its Topaz platform with Claude models to automate workflows, accelerate software delivery and build industry-specific AI agents for enterprise use.
Value in IT partnerships now shifting, says HFS Research
“Partnerships themselves are not new for Indian IT firms, which have long operated through ecosystems built around major enterprise software and cloud vendors. What is changing now is the nature of value delivered through those ecosystems,” Ashwin Venkatesan, executive research leader (IT), at global tech advisory HFS Research offered.
As AI becomes embedded within platforms, parts of traditional implementation and maintenance work are increasingly automated. This is shifting the services opportunity toward higher-order functions such as designing AI-infused workflows, orchestrating across multiple platforms, managing governance and guardrails, and driving enterprise-level transformation.
“The underlying logic remains specialization: let companies like Anthropic or Cursor focus on building models and agents, while services firms operate at the application and integration layer. This is how technology typically moves from ideation to enterprise-scale execution, and that dynamic is unlikely to change despite the democratization driven by GenAI and Agentic AI,” Gaurav Parab, Principal Research Analyst, NelsonHall added.
Enterprises are also grappling with fragmented AI choices, overlapping capabilities, rising compute costs, regulatory risks and unclear return pathways driven by existing process, data and tech debt. Ashwin elaborated that a study by HFS Research showed that less than 10% of G2000 companies have seen meaningful agentic AI adoption because of these challenges.
This in turn is expected to increase demand for providers that can arbitrate technology decisions, stitch ecosystems together, manage AI consumption economics and deliver predictable transformation roadmaps. Services firms are therefore moving from operating technology to integrating and orchestrating complex AI environments, linking advanced tools with legacy systems and organisational processes.
Two-pronged AI strategy becomes the new norm
“Most IT firms recognized this shift early and have moved on a two-pronged strategy—building internal platforms to assist custom and SaaS development on top of LLMs, while also partnering with AI-infused development and lifecycle tools. Firms that have not made this transition and continue to operate with low levels of automation are already seeing deal flow and renewals come under pressure,” Parab added.
The transition carries implications for revenue models as well. Automation is expected to reduce labour-heavy run work, pushing firms toward transformation-led engagements, outcome-linked pricing and shorter, modular modernisation programmes. Growth, in turn, is expected to come more from enabling enterprise change than from scaling traditional outsourcing volumes.
During the AI themed investor day conference, Infosys top brass outlined a similar shift in positioning AI services. The company said AI work is already embedded across a large share of major client programmes and is reshaping client engagements.