AI Is A Civilisation Shift; India IT Still In The Race: N Chandrasekaran | N18V

Straight

See, there is no question that AI is a fundamental technological change. So I have called it a civilizational change. The way to look at AI is it's the next infrastructure change. If you go back in history, the steam engines was a big infrastructural change. Energy, electricity was an infrastructural change. Internet was an infrastructural change. AI is the infrastructural change of intelligence.

So whenever there is an infrastructure change that happens, always these questions arise. What does it mean? What is it going to change in the world? How do we adopt it? Will the world be the same? Will businesses exist? Who will get the lift? Who will go down? These questions have always existed whenever such a big fundamental infrastructural change happens. And AI is no different. But the point to learn from history is whenever an infrastructural change like this happens, it unlocks opportunities.

So it creates so much more opportunities. So we ride the wave. What AI is going to do? It is going to change the cost structure of diagnosis, translation, basic analysis which will unlock so much more opportunities, so much more things to do which we have not been able to do before. All that will get done. Now I am now broadly talking about across industries. I'm not talking only about IT service. I'll come to IT services. I knew but I thought you will give me some space. [laughter]

So the second point is whenever there is abundance of labor and there is high growth rate, cost goes down and the services demand volume goes up significantly. That's what will happen with AI. Cost will go down for the reasons that I said but the demand will go up. Now coming to IT services, you should look at IT services as a big enterprise business. In this enterprise business, context is important. So for example, if there is a phenomenal invention that happens in a refrigerator or an air conditioner, you as a consumer see that and then you get super excited. You'll just throw your current refrigerator and put the new one. That's not the way companies work. Companies of context, companies of processes, customer, supplier, partner ecosystem, IT landscape, so many products, so many interfaces to be built. So you should look at IT services companies as integrators.