World’s biggest AI summit hosted by India has finally come to an end after five days of overwhelming sound bites, eye-popping predictions, and never-ending photo-ops of the biggest and brightest minds shaping the new world order.
By now, the world has realised AI isn’t just another tech trend. We are witnessing a moment in history that future generations will look back on as the Great Disruption.
During the summit, Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei dropped the biggest bombshell prediction – 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could be eliminated within the next 1 to 5 years. He etched a stone carving. AI isn’t just a new tool; it is acting as a “general labour substitute for humans.”
His arch-rival Sam Altman echoed his sentiment, “The world is not prepared,” he claimed at Express Adda, “models are evolving at such a fast pace that it’s stressing me out.”
On February 5th, OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex and its technical documentation, they included this:
“GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations.”
Models are now self-equipped to create better versions of themselves without any human intervention. This may come as a shock to you, because most of us are only using the default or least capable version of the technology, but the sooner we wake up to the reality, better it is.
Amid the cacophonies of innovations awaiting to happen, doomsday conspiracies, the biggest question mark lies on the future of Indian IT services industry, now facing a survival crisis.
But, before we delve into the present and the future, let’s go back in time to where and how it all started.
The Indian IT Story
Perhaps the most iconic image of birth of India’s IT story is from August 1963, when an IBM 1620 computer arrived at IIT Kanpur on a chartered DC-7 aircraft at an Air Force base, and then had to be transported to campus on a bullock cart.
The juxtaposition was both comical and prophetic, where an ancient vehicle was carrying a futuristic machine. The machine was so large that a wall had to be broken down to bring it into the Western Laboratories building because the door wasn’t wide enough. This made IIT Kanpur the first educational institution in India with a computer.
Prof. V. Rajaraman, who passed away in November 2025, built India’s first formal computer science program around this machine. Widely regarded as the father of computer science education in the country, he mentored the likes of N.R. Narayana Murthy, the founder of global IT giant Infosys.
In 1972, Narendra Patni, an MIT graduate and Forrester consultant, conceived the idea that low-end data digitisation work could be outsourced to India. He recruited Murthy and the rest is history.
And then came the Y2K problem and a two-digit bug that made Indian IT a global power.
When computer programs were being written in the 1970s and 1980s, storage was incredibly expensive — even a kilobyte cost around $100. To save space, programmers removed the “19” from every year and stored dates as two-digit numbers, so 1980 became simply “80”. This worked fine for decades. But as the clock prepared to tick over to January 1, 2000, there was a terrifying realization: computers wouldn’t know if “00” meant 2000 or 1900. The fear was that it would affect systems, in banking, utilities, aviation, government, it would fail, causing massive power outages, transportation shutdowns, and bank closures. This moment defined India as a global IT power.
The scale of panic was staggering. The total cost of the global Y2K solution likely surpassed $600 billion, with the US alone spending an estimated $134 billion. This came as an opportunity in disguise for Indian IT. Due to the country’s steep import barriers in the 1980s, no one could afford new computer systems. So Indian tech workers were the world’s leading experts in the older software languages.
Indians excelled in COBOL, a computer language that wasn’t even being taught in American colleges anymore. That’s when thousands of Indian software professionals winged their way to corporate destinations in Europe and North America to fix the Y2K bug on-site.
Tension peaked on December 31, 1999. Infosys Technologies set up a war room in Bangalore that operated 24 hours a day through January 4, along with similar Y2K rooms across US, Europe and Japan to resolve issues flagged by clients. India’s government itself set up a National Y2K Control Room.
And then, post midnight, nothing happened…the rollover was smooth across all sectors. The bug had been fixed. India had delivered.
Y2K windfall transformed India’s IT trajectory and made it a $8.26 billion global industry by 2001 from a billion-dollar industry in 1997. But it wasn’t just revenue; the moment won Indian programming a reputation for solving complex problems for over two decades. Over the next two decades, that Y2K-era trust compounded into a $300 billion industry employing 5.8 million people.
And now the same programming reputation is under threat of SaaSpocalypse, labour-arbitrage, billable hours, and legacy code expertise witnessed a $50 billion erosion because an AI company released tools that automate exactly those services.
On January 30, 2026, Anthropic unveiled a major upgrade to its enterprise AI stack through Claude Cowork and Claude Code, positioning them as end-to-end workflow automation tools rather than simple chatbots. The critical shift was not capability alone, but intent with which Anthropic openly framed these tools as a replacement for repetitive, white-collar software-driven work, not just an assistant.
AI Impact on Indian IT and will it survive?
Motilal Oswal report published on 5 February, 2026 predicts AI will render much of legacy software and testing redundant, “we believe 9-12% of IT services revenue stands to be eliminated. We expect this to happen over 3-4 years, underscoring a ~2% hit on revenue growth each year.”
The Indian-American technocrat and venture capitalist, has sounded ominous alarm bells – suggesting IT and BPO services may cease to exist after 2030 in their current form. “The thing with technology is either you change with it and leverage (it), or it leaves you behind,” Vinod Khosla said during the AI summit.
However, just like the Y2K moment, “The world isn’t as well equipped to adopt AI as India is, especially the developing world,” Khosla pointed out. “They have either very high costs in the West or very little knowledge like in Africa or Southeast Asia. Indian services companies can do AI services all over the world and that is the real opportunity.”
Anthropic CEO also suggests his company is not a bad dream for the IT services, a day after it collaborated with Infosys to deliver advanced enterprise AI solutions. “I think our intent is that if companies work together with us in like, a positive way, they can gain a lot, and we can gain a lot as well, right? We’re not trying to replace existing industries. There’s different ways things can go. And our hope is that we can work with these companies,” he told CNBC-TV18.
Infosys CEO Salil Parekh revealed that AI services already accounted for 5.5% of total revenue in the December quarter, and the company was working on 4,600 AI projects with more than 500 agents developed. Larger rival TCS reported AI services have also generating roughly 5.8% of annual revenue.
However a JPMorgan report (13 February, 2026) highlighted, “It’s overly simplistic to assume that AI can automatically generate enterprise-grade software and replace the value IT Services firms create across the cycle.”
Calling AI a subordinate to the overall software platform, HSBC experts say, “We see AI as being more of a learning algorithm than software or an application and see software as being more of an execution machine than a thinking machine; each has its place, and together they are stronger.”
The last time the world panicked about a software crisis, India built a $300 billion industry out of it, as Nandan Nilekani put it during the Infosys Investor day speech, “There is no opportunity risk in AI — only execution risk.”