India’s top CEOs of IT services companies came out in defence of the three-decade-old industry, at a time when its viability has been questioned due to the impact of artificial intelligence agents.
Tata Consultancy Services CEO and MD K Krithivasan said he does not foresee a ‘significant shrinkage’ in software engineering jobs going ahead because of the impact of AI, joining the list of corporate chiefs who have come out in strong defence of India’s $283 billion technology industry.
“The role of system integrators come into place as the systems are complex, and it will not be a situation that one day you will have large language models (LLMs) auto generate codes, and all the engineers will go away,” he said during a discussion at the India AI Impact Summit.
His comments come in the backdrop of Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, saying that India’s much vaunted IT and BPO services industry will cease to exist as new AI-native services will replace traditional outsourcing models.
His comments have been refuted by Happiest Minds Founder Ashok Soota.Krithivasan said AI will, as expected, bring in higher productivity and the roles of engineers will shift from just coding to contextual engineering, and there will be more focus on cybersecurity.
Infosys CEO Salil Parekh agreed and said that AI services present a $300 billion opportunity for several years, with focus on AI engineering, which means building and orchestrating of agents, besides legacy systems modernisation.
The IT services industry has been plagued over the last few years with sluggish growth in uncertain macroeconomic conditions.
C Vijayakumar, CEO of HCLTech, said all LLMs cannot be applied for enterprise use cases as there is a gap between what they deliver and the efficiency that is possible.
“We bridge the gap by building the IP that helps enterprise scale in adoption.”
Similarly, the rapid creation of data centres presents huge opportunities for IT players.