

Doom scroll: Just how hard will artificial intelligence hit the business models of IT service companies?
Big Tech’s acceleration of Agentic AI hangs like a sword of Damocles over traditional IT services. Consequently, global tech and Indian IT stocks lurch between optimism and unease as investors weigh the impact of these artificial intelligence (AI) tools on a services model built largely on billing human effort. The debate has moved beyond incremental automation to deeper concern over AI agents that can generate code, test applications and manage infrastructure.
If enterprises trust them at scale, the base of the IT pyramid would shrink, leaving junior coders, testers and maintenance staff adrift. Revenue growth would slow, margins tighten and entry-level hiring thin out. Equity markets have taken fright.
Citrini Research’s latest Substack post rattled investors by outlining how Generative and Agentic AI could pose a structural threat to the offshore labour-arbitrage model over the next 2-3 years. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has argued that large swathes of traditional IT services could be automated away. AI leaders hold the mikes.
When Anthropic’s chief Dario Amodei warns that advanced AI could sharply reduce demand for entry-level coders, investors listen. And with good reason. Just this month, Anthropic sent one shudder after another down IT sector spines: first with plug-ins for its Claude agent capable of handling legal, sales and analytics tasks; then with a code-security tool that identified hundreds of vulnerabilities; and most recently with claims that its models can streamline Cobol code running on legacy systems.
Anthropic’s first blow cost investors almost $285 billion in lost market cap globally. Next, cybersecurity stocks such as CrowdStrike and Okta slid sharply. On Monday, IBM suffered its steepest
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