Even as large IT services and consulting firms grapple with the challenge of scale while evolving into AI-ready players, a growing number of boutique AI deployment firms are emerging as contenders in the enterprise AI market. Much like in the US, in India too such businesses are winning deals as they help businesses deploy AI effectively at scale.
Last week, the engineering team behind online marketplace Cars24, led by Head of AI Jayesh Gupta, launched Deployment Inc. This AI deployment firm will employ Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) to help enterprise clients across sectors reorient systems around AI agents.
Together with co-founder and former xAI engineer Aayush Gupta, and fresh capital of $5 million, the entity intends to hire 50 FDEs within a month to jumpstart operations. “Deployment Inc is a Cars24-backed company that emerged from a problem we had already spent years solving internally,” Gupta said.
He pointed out that while powerful AI models are now widely accessible the more difficult challenge is deployment. This calls for connecting AI to real enterprise data and existing systems, redesigning workflows, building evaluation frameworks and human escalation, and ensuring that frontline teams actually adopt the technology.
Cars24, which is also an OpenAI Select Partner, encountered the challenge itself while building and deploying AI agents across customer support, vehicle inspections, lending, document workflows and internal operations.
The integration eventually produced solid measurable outcomes – support turnaround time reduced from 32 hours to 30 minutes, AI handles more than a million minutes of customer conversations each month and vehicle inspection time was cut from 50 minutes to 25 minutes across 1,00,000 inspections per month, with the same engineering team delivering three times the output. “Deployment Inc is an extension of that execution capability,” he added.
Similarly, a couple of weeks ago, Amsterdam-based AI startup Wonderful launched its India operations, promising to deploy AI at scale and targeting large enterprise clients across BFSI, telecom, healthcare, retail and media. The one year-old startup will set up teams with deployment strategists, GTM specialists and FDEs. At the opening of its Mumbai office, co-founder and CTO Roey Lalazar said Wonderful had plans to compete against the monopoly held by system integrators. To this end, the firm is hiring “hundreds” of FDEs.
“Industry statistics show that nearly 87% of AI pilots fail. For us, once a customer reaches the pilot stage, the likelihood of it becoming a paying production customer is close to 100%,” Lalazar said. He added that IT services firms attempting AI transformation programmes have shown some instances of success in solo use cases but rarely on a large scale.
Besides the massive scope in the Indian enterprise segment, added complexities in local businesses also present themselves as the ideal ground for the FDE model to prove itself. “Most domestic companies here run on a fragmented mix of modern APIs, legacy databases, and manual operations. Off-the-shelf foundation models cannot deliver value on day one,” Neil Shah, Co-founder and Vice President of Research at Counterpoint Research, said.
“Firms like Deployment Inc. and Wonderful treat AI adoption as an operational overhaul rather than a software subscription. In a cost-sensitive and operationally complex market like India, bridging the gap between raw models and measurable ROI will allow these agile firms to capture high-value digital transformation budgets over traditional IT consultancies,” he added.
Others pointed out that this ability to build custom AI applications is a much bigger threat to software firms such as SAP and Oracle than to IT services firms.
“There are several examples of well-funded AI deployment startups outside India like Hang Ten Systems, founded by Vishal Sikka. But there are also early-stage enterprise AI application solution startups that are building full-stack applications in a specific sector like finance or marketing,” Gaurav Vasu, founder & CEO at UnearthInsights, said. “There is Procure AI and Zip, which are just solving procurement issues for enterprises in the US.”
A focused deployment firm has the advantage of speed – there are fewer handoffs between advisory, staffing, integration, and maintenance teams. However, this doesn’t necessarily translate into an advantage over large IT firms, Gupta admitted. To be sure, IT services have significant strengths in scale, procurement trust, and domain expertise.
“Deployment Inc’s advantage has to come from talent density, operating proof, end-to-end accountability, speed, and the ability to turn repeated deployment work into reusable software,” Gupta explained. The idea, he said is not to try and out-scale IT firms. Instead, the focus is only on workflows where customers need an AI deployment quickly and want one team which is accountable until the outcome is achieved.
Shah predicted that a new crop of VC-backed deployment firms will emerge, prompting legacy IT majors to either launch internal outcome-based units or acquire these startups outright. However, the main bottleneck for these could be governance, especially in critical verticals like BFSI and healthcare. “These custom agents must demonstrate enterprise-grade reliability, data security, IP and compliance. The market will demand the same rigour and guardrails that traditional enterprise IT has delivered for decades,” he said.