

Reports of SaaS’s death at the hands of AI have been greatly exaggerated
The AI scare has come knocking on the doors of Indian IT sooner than expected. Spooked by rapid advances in agentic AI, the Nifty IT has erased 20% of investor wealth this month, even as the broader market has remained flat.But as doomsday theories proliferate, the other side of the story is being ignored – that AI’s impact will be multi-layered and will depend on how India Inc adapts. Let’s discuss.
Earlier this month, Palantir said it had cut enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration timelines from years to weeks using agentic AI. Soon after, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork announced open-source plugins that similarly compress workflows across legal, finance, sales and marketing. The global agentic AI market is set to expand more than six-fold to $43 billion over the next five years, according to a whitepaper by LTIMindtree.Indian IT works on a headcount-based pricing model – the more the resources deployed on a project, the higher the billed revenue.
The possibility that AI agents could replace the work of thousands of IT professionals threatens to disrupt this long-standing business model. Application managed services, which currently contribute 22-45% to the sector’s revenues, are the most at risk, according to a note by Jefferies.Coforge, Hexaware, and Tech Mahindra derive the largest portion of their revenue from application services, according to aMint analysis of Gartner and Jefferies estimates. Their stocks have fallen as much as 33% over the past month.
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