India’s IT Chiefs Brace for AI Reset but Reject Collapse Fears

India’s top IT executives this week pushed back against fears that advances in generative AI could derail the sector’s growth, arguing that enterprise adoption will be gradual and that companies must adapt rather than resist.

Speaking at the two-day Nasscom Technology and Leadership Forum in Mumbai, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd Chief Executive Officer (CEO) K. Krithivasan and HCL Technologies Ltd CEO C. Vijayakumar said artificial intelligence represents a structural shift but not an existential threat to India’s $250 billion IT services industry.

Krithivasan described generative AI as a “civilization shift” and said TCS is prepared to cannibalize parts of its existing revenue if that helps deliver better outcomes for clients.

“If you can do something faster, better and cheaper with AI, you should,” he said, adding that the willingness to disrupt one’s own business model is critical to long-term relevance.

He stressed that AI adoption requires a cultural shift led from the top, with leadership encouraging employees to proactively recommend AI solutions to customers, even if it reduces short-term billing.

Vijayakumar said the industry is at “its biggest inflection point yet” but dismissed suggestions of rapid, sweeping disruption. Enterprise adoption, he argued, will take time.

“It’s not as dramatic as it’s being portrayed,” he said, describing the transition as “painful because it really involves people.”

The comments come amid investor concerns about automation’s impact on traditional IT services such as legal processing, marketing support and software maintenance.

Shares of major IT firms have declined this year, with TCS and HCLTech down roughly 16-to-17% since January.

In late January, AI lab Anthropic released new capabilities for its Claude platform and said in a subsequent blog post that AI could help modernize legacy systems, including software used by banks to manage ATMs. That fueled fresh debate about whether automation could compress revenue in India’s outsourcing-heavy model.

Krithivasan said rapid advances in AI models are solving problems that remained unresolved for decades.

“Sometimes all it takes is a new prompt string to unlock significant value,” he said.

Vijayakumar added that while the pace of technological change is accelerating, deployment in large enterprises tends to lag, cushioning the impact on services firms.