Chiefs of India’s software services majors on Friday dispelled fears of a potential extinction of the sector observing there will be more job opportunities in context engineering, cybersecurity and other areas.S peaking at the AI Impact Summit, the CEOs countered the apprehension that AI tools would make SaaS and IT firms irrelevant.
Asked to respond to comments by Vinod Khosla and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said, “That’s easy, Nandan is always right!” Khosla had observed that the IT services market will vanish by 2030 while Nilekani said a plan of action was in play to spur the IT giant’s evolution to amass revenue opportunities in AI.
Long Tail of AI Adoption
TCS CEO K Krithivasan observed that the role of system integrators who tackle complex legacy systems would not go away because of AI systems. “I don’t envisage a significant shrinkage of work but there will be more volume of work produced, and more interesting work that will be done,” Krithivasan said. He added there will be more job roles in context engineering, cybersecurity and other areas. As of now only 30 – 40% enterprises have completed cloud adoption despite cloud transformation being a part of the landscape for a while. “There is a long tail to AI adoption,” he stated. Krithivasan said that while there are concerns that AI will take entry-level jobs away, there is also credible proof that AI will enable people to learn.
HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar spoke about how the massive capex spend of Big Tech companies triggers IT services spend. “Building all these data centers, AI factories, and that would mean the IT infrastructure landscape around the world would get refreshed over the next five to eight years. That itself is a huge services opportunity,” he said.
Vijaykumar also observed that emerging areas like Physical AI were entirely new sources of revenue, which could potentially be a $1 trillion opportunity. However, to encash on these segments, he said that they would have to prepare ahead and pour funds into R&D.
Infrastructure Refresh
Salesforce President and CEO Arundhati Bhattacharya reasoned the logic behind the market reactions saying, “People are pumping up AI especially because of the funds that have been invested.
A lot of these investments are also circular by the way. So, am not too sure that the market is sending the right message,” she noted. Bhattacharya also said that AI is inclusive and not meant for white collar workers alone. “Blue collar workers like plumbers, carpenters or anganwadi workers also have several issues related to skilling, access, payments which can be solved with AI,” she said.