AI will transform, not diminish, India’s IT services industry: Anand Mahindra

New Delhi: Tech Mahindra Chairman Anand Mahindra has dismissed concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) will undermine India’s IT services industry, asserting that the sector’s role will evolve and become even more significant as enterprises increasingly adopt AI at scale.

Addressing shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting (AGM), Mahindra said every major technological shift has sparked fears about job losses and disruption, but AI should instead be viewed as a catalyst for the next phase of growth for the industry.

“At the very outset, let me tackle the elephant in the room — which is the prediction that the rise of Artificial Intelligence will kill IT services in India. Every major technology cycle creates such anxieties,” he said.

Mahindra maintained that while AI will reshape the industry, it will not reduce the importance of IT services.

“Instead, the industry’s role will become more critical as businesses require trusted partners to deploy AI securely and effectively,” Mahindra noted.

He noted that AI has moved beyond being a productivity tool on the periphery of organisations and is now central to how enterprises design work, serve customers, manage risk and make decisions. However, implementing AI at enterprise scale remains far more challenging than simply envisioning its capabilities.

According to Mahindra, most enterprises continue to operate with legacy systems, fragmented data, complex regulations and accumulated technology debt, making AI deployment a sophisticated integration exercise rather than a plug-and-play solution.

He said this is where companies like Tech Mahindra play a crucial role by helping organisations integrate, govern and customise AI in a secure and responsible manner. Comparing AI to a smartphone, Mahindra said the real value lies not in the underlying technology itself but in the applications, connectivity and enterprise solutions built around it.

He further said an enterprise’s true competitive advantage, or “alpha”, will increasingly come from its proprietary data, business workflows, domain expertise and institutional knowledge. Tech Mahindra’s role, he added, is to help clients preserve and enhance that advantage through AI-powered platforms, workflows and solutions.

IANS