AI is rewriting a fundamental equation of IT services: productivity can rise without proportional headcount growth. In Western markets, workforce reduction is often presented as evidence of successful AI adoption. For India, with its young workforce and deep technology capabilities, importing that playbook would be a strategic mistake.
Nasscom projected India’s technology industry would generate $315 billion in FY2026 while employing 5.95 million people, with net additions of 135,000. The numbers underline a critical challenge: industry growth need not translate into employment growth at the same rate.
Indian IT companies must turn AI-driven productivity into new businesses, new markets and sustainable employment—not merely lower delivery costs.
Transform technology talent into business-technology talent
AI capabilities alone will not deliver enduring differentiation. Competitive advantage will come from combining AI with industry knowledge, business economics, operational workflows and customer problems.
Indian IT companies should systematically develop multidisciplinary professionals who understand how businesses operate, where value is lost, and how AI-enabled solutions can improve revenue, margins, speed and customer experience.
Reskilling must therefore move beyond coding, prompting and certifications towards domain specialisation, process redesign, commercial judgement and consultative problem-solving. The opportunity is to build one of the world’s largest pools of industry-specialised, AI-enabled business-technology talent.
Turn IT companies into venture-creation engines
Surplus capacity should become a source of enterprise creation, not automatically a redundancy list.
Companies should establish small, funded multidisciplinary venture pods combining domain specialists, AI engineers, cloud architects, cybersecurity experts and product leaders. Give them validated industry problems, customer access, defined budgets and 90-day milestones to develop, test and commercialise solutions.
Scale initiatives demonstrating customer adoption and willingness to pay; stop those without traction. Successful pods can become new practices, intellectual-property-led products, platforms or independently capitalised ventures.
This creates an institutional pathway from employee capability to entrepreneurship, without requiring every professional to become a founder.
Build customer-facing growth and deployment pods
Product development without customer acquisition is innovation without a business model.
Dedicated pods should combine consultative selling, commercial negotiation, industry expertise and AI, data, cloud and cybersecurity capabilities. Their mandate: identify customer problems, quantify economic value, secure commercial commitments and accelerate deployment, including for underserved mid-market enterprises.
This model is already taking shape. According to Indeed data reported by Express Computer, Indian postings for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) rose nearly 19-fold between June 2025 and June 2026. HCLTech is developing an FDE academy to build customer-facing AI engineering capabilities. FDEs demonstrate how engineering can move closer to business outcomes. Venture pods can create new offerings; deployment pods can turn them into scalable revenue.
Create a national capability-to-enterprise ecosystem
Training certificates and startup registrations are not substitutes for viable businesses. Government, industry bodies, IT companies and educational institutions should jointly develop accredited business-technology programmes connected to real industry problems, venture pods, customer pilots and commercial outcomes.
Public funding can co-finance retraining and experimentation; companies must provide mentors, infrastructure, customer access and commercial accountability. Measure success through new revenue, viable enterprises, customer adoption and sustainable employment.
AI may reduce the people required to perform existing work. India’s opportunity is to use that productivity to create entirely new categories of work, businesses and economic value. The strategic shift is from workforce reduction to workforce reinvention—and from technology services to enterprise creation.