Written by The Hopinion• May 29, 2025• 7:40 am• AI & Machine Learning, Business, Innovations

India’s $150 Billion Pivot: Can Its IT Giants Survive When AI Writes the Code?

HomeAI & Machine Learning, Business, InnovationsIndia’s $150 Billion Pivot: Can Its IT Giants Survive When AI Writes the Code?

As Agentic AI systems reshape how software gets built, India’s IT giants are racing to reinvent themselves, before their largest export becomes their biggest liability.

A high-contrast, cinematic illustration of a South Asian software developer standing in a vast, dimly lit server room.

“AI won’t just write code, it will manage the lifecycle, make decisions, and optimize itself.”

That quote from a senior Infosys executive in late 2024 didn’t make global headlines. But in retrospect, it may prove as pivotal as any policy speech or tech launch in shaping the future of South Asia’s economy.

A tectonic shift is underway in global software development. At its core is Agentic AI, systems capable not only of generating code but autonomously executing multi-step tasks: analyzing requirements, debugging, testing, deploying, and iterating. These systems don’t assist developers. Increasingly, they replace them.

And that raises a stark question: What happens when the world no longer needs millions of people to write the world’s code?

For India, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and others that built their global position on outsourced software services, this isn’t just an industrial disruption. It’s a generational test.

From Manpower to Machine Learning

The scale of what’s unfolding is hard to exaggerate.

As of 2025, more than 65% of new code is written with AI assistance. By 2028, most experts believe routine codebases, CRUD apps, system maintenance, even QA, will be fully automated through Agentic AI platforms. A small team of AI-supervised engineers will be able to do what once took dozens.

This is not a distant future. It’s already embedded in products like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Deep Research, and TCS MasterCraft™, tools that don’t just suggest code, but actively rearchitect systems.

For India, whose IT services exports surpassed $150 billion last year and employed over 5 million people, the implications are existential. If the world no longer needs human coders at scale, what does India export?

The Big Five Push Back

The good news: India’s tech giants, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, and Tech Mahindra, aren’t standing still. The last 18 months have seen a near-frantic pace of innovation, partnership, and internal restructuring.

Key Trends (2024–2025)

AI Is the Strategy: Over 80% of Indian tech firms now see AI as a “core strategic priority,” surpassing the global average. (EY India, Fortune India)
Scaling, Not Piloting: Companies are moving past experimentation to full-scale integration—embedding Agentic AI in client operations, internal tooling, and product pipelines.
Efficiency as the Hook: GenAI rollouts often begin with promises of cost savings and productivity, but evolve into reimagined workflows.
Skills Over Scale: With code commodified, firms are investing massively in AI literacy, governance, and domain-specific intelligence. India now leads globally in AI skill penetration. (Stanford AI Index 2024)

Inside the AI Playbooks

Let’s break down how each tech major is responding—not just with slogans, but systemic reinvention.

TCS: Agentic AI at Scale

AI Revenue Soars: Chairman N Chandrasekaran calls GenAI the “single most transformative force” of 2024. AI and emerging tech delivered $30B in revenue in FY25.
MasterCraft™ + WisdomNext™: Its new-gen platform now includes Agentic AI features that reduce modernization costs by over 70%.
580 Active AI Projects: Across IT, cybersecurity, and business operations—many handled through AI agents in production.
Google Cloud Partnership: Strategic collaborations to power AI in telecom and media.
Largest AI-Trained Workforce Goal: Aims to build the world’s most AI-proficient engineering force by end of 2025.

Infosys: Building AI from the Foundation

Infosys Topaz: Integrates GenAI and Agentic automation across sectors, from finance to energy.
“Poly AI” Philosophy: Emphasizes hybrid architectures and interoperability between models.
Enterprise LLMs: Prioritizes efficient, mid-size models (2–7B parameters) for enterprise use.
AI Foundry + Factory: Enables rapid prototyping and cross-vertical application development.
AI-Guided Workflows: Predicts most digital roles will operate under AI supervision by 2026.

Wipro: Operationalizing AI for Enterprise

ai360 Framework: Scales AI from pilot to production, including custom Agentic AI for finance and logistics.
$1.8B in AI-Driven Deals (Q4 FY25): Major wins in healthcare, BFSI, and telecom.
Wipro Ventures: Invested $200M in startups focused on AI infrastructure.
Shift to Agentic Workflows: Back-office and support ops now run on AI-first frameworks.

HCLTech: AI for Engineering, Security, and Industry

Insight for Manufacturing: Detects defects in real-time using Agentic AI and Google Cloud.
SmartTwin™ + Omniverse: Combines digital twins with AI-powered simulation.
Cybersecurity Overhaul: Builds AI-native security frameworks through Google Cloud Security.
IIT Collaboration: AI BSc program with IIT Guwahati for employee upskilling.

Tech Mahindra: Delivering “AI Right”

agentX + SDLC AmplifAIer: Automate full software lifecycles, from intake to deployment.
Project Indus: India’s first foundational LLM, open-sourced for responsible innovation.
VerifAI: Ensures alignment with regulations and mitigates hallucination risk.
Generative AI Studio: A testbed of 50+ enterprise-ready AI use cases.

The Real Threat: Outsourcing Itself Is Obsolete

Here’s where the transformation becomes existential.

Yes, Agentic AI makes software development faster and cheaper.
But it also makes offshore outsourcing less necessary.

Agentic AI lowers the technical barrier.

A U.S. firm no longer needs 10 engineers in Bengaluru to build a web platform. Two in-house staff with Agentic tools can do it faster and more securely. These tools:

Interpret specs
Auto-generate code
Test and debug
Deploy to cloud
Learn and improve

The cost advantage is gone.

Outsourcing’s economic logic, “cheaper labor abroad”, no longer holds. AI doesn’t care where you’re located. It simply reduces labor everywhere.

Now, it’s tool access, not geography, that determines cost and speed.

Software becomes co-designed, not handed off.

Where outsourcing once relied on formal specs and offshore development, Agentic systems now allow real-time iteration between product managers, designers, and AIs. Coders shift from builders to orchestrators.

Rewriting the Social Contract

Yet for all this innovation, most Indian developers aren’t building agents at Infosys or designing LLMs for Tech Mahindra. They’re handling support tickets, maintaining legacy systems, working in tier-2 cities, jobs that Agentic AI is already quietly replacing.

The coming wave won’t eliminate these roles overnight. But it will erode their value, unless workers are reskilled and moved into higher-order tasks: oversight, governance, compliance, and architecture.

India’s lead in AI skill penetration is promising. But skill doesn’t guarantee access. Without broad-based reskilling and serious policy alignment, millions could be left behind.

The IT boom of the 2000s exported digital labor.
The AI boom of the 2020s must export intelligence, judgment, and AI stewardship.

Survive, Then Lead

What South Asia faces now mirrors what China faced in manufacturing a decade ago: the need to move from volume to value.

Agentic AI isn’t just rewriting code. It’s rewriting careers, economies, and the global division of labor.

India’s tech giants are fighting to stay ahead, pivoting to design, governance, and enterprise-scale integration. But whether the broader ecosystem can keep up through education, investment, and equitable access remains the decisive question.