A crystal ball that scans a visitor’s hand and prints a tarot card, software that lets people try on clothes virtually and a robot dog that suddenly stops responding to its operator may sound like entertainment.
At Hexaware Technologies’ AI Day 2026 in Chennai on Friday, however, the demonstrations were designed to illustrate a bigger shift: AI is moving beyond chatbots and screens to understand images, interpret physical environments and interact with machines.
The shift is already reflected in Hexaware’s business. For the first time, the mid-tier IT services company disclosed that more than 50% of its revenue now comes from AI and AI-infused solutions.
The company wants to increase that contribution through Zerovity, its AI-led platform aimed at reducing friction across software development and enterprise technology, including vulnerabilities, technical debt, backlogs, defects, tickets and licences.
One of the demonstrations showed how image recognition and natural-language processing could bring AI to workers who may not have technical expertise. A technician repairing a washing machine, for instance, could photograph the machine and send the image to an AI system, which could identify the problem and provide instructions on how to fix it.
“Image recognition and natural-language processing come together to turn a complex application into something a non-technical worker can use,” a Hexaware engineer said.
The virtual clothing demonstration similarly showed how AI can interpret images and translate them into an interactive experience, while the tarot-card application was largely a playful use of the same underlying capabilities.
The robot dog demonstration pointed to a more serious implication of this convergence between software and the physical world. The machine was initially being controlled through a remote, before another engineer demonstrated how an attacker could potentially intercept the communication, gain access to the robot’s camera and take control of its motors and other functions.
As quadruped robots move into industrial and defence applications, such vulnerabilities could have consequences beyond data theft or software disruption. “Imagine if this happens in defence. If the enemy is sending robots and you are able to take them back and send them back to them — that is the kind of technology,” a Hexaware official said.
The company is not suggesting its demonstration represents a battlefield-ready system, but the experiment highlights how cyber and physical security could increasingly overlap.
A humanoid robot being controlled through a motion-capture suit offered another example of how AI and robotics could be combined for industrial applications. The suit converts human movements into data that can be mapped to the robot’s joints, allowing the machine to replicate those movements. One possible application is surveillance, with robots potentially monitoring factories or other facilities continuously.
For Hexaware, however, the immediate opportunity remains enterprise software. The company sees AI making it faster and cheaper for businesses to build customised software instead of relying on expensive or ageing SaaS products.
CEO R Srikrishna said the company is targeting the roughly $900-billion global SaaS market, highlighting that customised software can now be built in weeks or months rather than years. Legacy modernisation is another opportunity, particularly for enterprises dependent on Cobol.
While estimates put the broader Cobol replacement market at around $1 trillion, Srikrishna said Hexaware sees $29-30 billion as addressable.