Heads of India’s top IT companies on Friday said software services industry will remain relevant in the artificial intelligence era though their roles might change, allaying fears of AI rendering the industry redundant.
K Krithivasan, chief executive officer and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), said while it’s not clear exactly what the roles will be a few years down the line due to disruption owing to AI, he does not envisage a “significant shrinkage” to TCS and the industry at large.
Roles might change to accommodate the new technologies but “at the core, as system integrators we’re a necessity,” he said at the India AI Impact Summit here.
“The role of system integrators comes into play because there are complex systems, and many of them have a lot of legacy,” Krithivasan said. “It is not that one day you can have an LLM understand everything, auto generate codes and software engineers will go away… There will be more and more productivity brought in.”
He said more software engineers will be required to test and validate along the lines of how they can build the right system, how they can validate if the system is doing the right thing, whether it has cybersecurity or is doing any harm.
Arundhati Bhattacharya, president and CEO of Salesforce, South Asia, said all the models of work that organisations across the board have in place today will change and companies will have to be agile to keep pace with those changes. But she dismissed the view that LLMs will make software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies redundant.
“The SaaS model is not only about vibe coding or creating an application. It is also about understanding what the workflows are like, realising what the customer’s pain points are, and ensuring you are addressing those. It is about observability about what your agents are doing, it is about governance, auditability and adoption,” she said.
Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said the company recently assessed the opportunities in AI services in six specific sectors and found that this alone represents a $300-billion opportunity over the next several years.
On Tuesday, at the Infosys Investor AI Day, Parekh had outlined AI strategy, data for AI, process for AI, agentic legacy modernisation, physical AI, and AI trust as the six promising areas of growth.
“If we can pivot our company to serve these big six areas, then the opportunity is good,” he said, adding that AI is opening up a new set of opportunities and productivity benefits.
Parekh said legacy modernisation represents one of the largest opportunities within this framework.
Infosys has recruited 20,000 college graduates this year to build future-ready AI capabilities, he added.
Vijayakumar C, CEO and managing director of HCLTech, said the company “will continue to modernise and evolve our services to be relevant for the future even if it means it takes away some of our revenue streams.”
He said LLMs cannot be applied most efficiently for enterprise use cases and that there are still gaps.
“We are really trying to bridge the gap and build IPs that help enterprises to scale AI adoption,” Vijayakumar said. “We’re also focused on a lot of specialised services like physical AI, AI factory, agentic AI.”
He said the company is partnering with almost all the large solution providers. “We’re not building models but we’re building solutions which will make the models much more scalable and applicable to enterprises.”
He also noted that the software product business delivers 10% of HCLTech’s revenue.