
IT honchos dismiss AI fears ahead of annual industry gala
Mint on 19 February.Concerns around the death knell for the IT services sector comes after India’s $283 billion IT sector lost at least $45 billion in market value in the first six weeks of this year.The knee-jerk reaction came after OpenAI’s GPT 5.3-Codex and Anthropic’s Claude 4.6-Cowork demonstrated abilities to automate tasks such as sales invoicing, legal processes and more, which is handled by TCS, Infosys, and HCLTech. Shares of these IT firms fell 10-14% in five days, after Anthropic and OpenAI’s launches.Still, like Altman, many believe that AI could actually lead to being a new growth vector for IT services.“Enterprises won’t splurge on AI until they see clear business returns, and for them, the big takeaway will be to ensure that it works with legacy systems and gives actual benefits—none of which should kill the middleware layer of technology firms,” Ana Paula Assis, senior vice-president and chair for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific at IBM, told Mint.On 9 February, analysts at brokerage firm Investec also argued in favour of the tech outsourcers, and said they “should benefit from legacy code modernization, migration of legacy SaaS (software as a service) applications, building AI foundation layers for enterprises and physical AI, among other opportunities.”On 15 February, analysts at Kotak Institutional Equities also questioned if OpenAI and Anthropic’s advancements were hyped more than what there were worth.“Benchmarking results (of AI models) aligned more with incremental improvements rather than a large step-up in capabilities.
There are standout cases, but the average experience remains mixed…" the note said. "It is difficult to justify expectations of a large disruption to the IT services
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