Gaps are emerging between AI’s promise and delivery: Is there an opportunity in this for India’s IT firms?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Technological revolutions have a familiar rhythm. First comes excitement, then investment, and then an awkward phase of reality refusing to cooperate with the narrative. Artificial intelligence (AI) has now entered that third phase.Over the past year, large technology firms have cut thousands of jobs while increasing investment in AI.
These have been framed at least partly as a pivot to an AI-driven future. The storyline is neat: machines will do more, humans will do less and productivity will rise accordingly. Markets seem to favour the narrative.
The problem is that the technology has not quite caught up with it.Across companies, AI is improving productivity, but not in the clean substitutional way headlines suggest. Engineers are writing code faster, but also spending more time reviewing and debugging it. Designers are generating more options, but not necessarily better ones.
Analysts are processing more data, but still need to verify what the system confidently presents as fact.This creates a peculiar situation: firms can feel both more productive and more constrained at the same time. One might call it efficiency with supervision. For Indian enterprises, this is especially relevant.
Historically, Indian businesses have been quick to adopt global technology trends, often using them as signals of modernization as much as tools for efficiency. Cloud, digital transformation, and analytics all followed this pattern. It is now AI’s turn.But the operational reality in India is often complex.
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