OPINION | Indian IT is at a crossroads. Their risk appetite will determine if it will be history or reincarnated

Indian IT should be building, exporting, and owning new platforms.

At Infosys’s recent InStep celebration, journalist Chandra R. Srikanth moderated a rare panel that brought together NR Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, and Salil Parekh. They reminisced about 25 years of global internships, multiculturalism, and the enduring importance of “learnability”. It was a feel-good defense of the industry’s future.

But what struck me most was they insisted that Indian IT has survived many obituaries before and will survive this one too. The reality is harsher: this time the obituary is very real, and the dark clouds are already here.

AI and Trump represent a double whammy

Artificial intelligence is dismantling the foundations of the industry faster than most are willing to admit. And now comes another jolt from across the ocean: Donald Trump’s vow to ban or tax outsourcing to India. If AI threatens to make Indian IT irrelevant, Trump threatens to make it illegal. It is a rare moment when exponential change and political absurdity collide—leaving little room for complacency.

Even without Trump, the shift is existential. AI is not simply adding tools or efficiencies; it is rewriting the very basis of work. Much of what Indian IT was built on—code maintenance, bug fixes, testing, documentation, legacy modernization and integration—is being swallowed whole by automated systems that need no human intervention. These once formed the bedrock of India’s services model. Now they are the lowest-hanging fruit for AI.

Reskilling cannot rescue millions from this tide. You cannot retrain your way out of structural obsolescence. There are not enough high-end AI engineering roles to absorb armies of programmers whose skills can be replicated in seconds by large language models and agentic systems. Unless the industry creates new categories of work and ventures into unexplored domains, it will run out of things to reskill for. And it must reduce its dependence on the American market, because the real opportunities now lie elsewhere.

Data’s indeed India’s greatest strategic advantage

Salil Parekh rightly pointed out that India’s greatest strategic advantage is data: dense, real-world signals spanning healthcare, infrastructure, agriculture, water, climate, education, and commerce. This is not the scraped detritus of the internet that powers today’s models. It is the lived reality of a billion people, and if harnessed properly, it can fuel systems no other country can match. That is a competitive edge the U.S. and Europe cannot replicate.

Nandan Nilekani’s call for first principles thinking was also valid, but it must be more than rhetoric. First principles mean asking what customers truly need and building systems that deliver outcomes, not inputs. It means abandoning the headcount-based delivery model for platforms that deliver prediction, precision, and resilience. It means reimagining Indian IT not as a services vendor but as a designer of systems and architectures for the future, something I am not sure that these companies are ready to do.

Build platforms for markets Western companies ignore

Consider one example. My company, Vionix Biosciences, is preparing to pilot a system across Bengaluru and other cities, built on breakthrough technologies developed in India by IIT Madras and AIIMS (something Indian IT companies don’t seem to believe is possible in India). The platform uses AI and spectral analysis to continuously monitor water and sewage for toxins, pathogens, and early signs of outbreaks—before symptoms appear. Dozens of devices will stream data into real-time dashboards of population health across hundreds of locations. Instead of merely recording what has gone wrong, the system will anticipate what is about to go wrong. The impact could be transformative: an always-on, autonomous public health infrastructure that alerts officials before hospitals fill up.

This is exactly the type of trillion-dollar platform Indian IT should be designing and exporting. It is not a consulting assignment or a coding contract; it is a living intelligence system, built on Indian science, solving problems that no Western company is even attempting.

The same logic applies across agriculture, logistics, and infrastructure. AI can forecast pest outbreaks, fine-tune irrigation, and adapt fertilization to local soils, raising yields while conserving resources. It can reroute shipments in real time, predict equipment failures, and shrink the carbon footprint of entire supply chains. Embedded sensors and analytics can detect cracks and leaks in bridges, tunnels, and pipelines long before they collapse. AI fused with hydrological models and satellite data can forecast floods, map heat islands, monitor water quality, and help cities prepare for extreme weather. These are the platforms Indian IT should be building, exporting, and owning—not clinging to outsourced maintenance contracts for American corporations.

Don’t move ahead by looking at the rearview mirror

There isn’t much time and the pivot must be radical. Indian IT must stop sitting on its laurels and start taking real risks. That means putting billions of dollars into proprietary infrastructure and partnering seriously with India’s greatest assets: the IITs, AIIMS, IISc, ISRO, and the dozens of research labs pushing the frontiers of science and engineering. It means tackling messy, real-world problems that do not have off-the-shelf solutions and turning India’s breakthroughs into global platforms. It means elevating engineers and scientists back to the center of the enterprise, and refusing to wait for governments or startups to do the heavy lifting.

The irony is that the very companies that built their reputations coding for Fortune 500 clients now have the chance to tackle humanity’s most urgent problems: safe water, resilient cities, affordable healthcare. The opportunity for reincarnation is enormous—but only if they summon the courage to take it.

The dark clouds of AI disruption and Trump’s hostility to outsourcing are not distant storms, they are already overhead. Whether Indian IT is remembered for its obituary or for its reincarnation depends entirely on the choices it makes in this moment. AI has already lit the funeral pyre of the old model. From that fire, a stronger incarnation could emerge—one that owns intellectual property, builds platforms, and takes on the grand challenges of our time. But only if the industry wakes up now.