Hello and welcome to the India today business today studio here at the World Economic Forum for Brainstorm 2026. I have with me the boss, the CEO and MD of one of India's largest IT companies, HCLTech, C Vijayakumar. Always a pleasure to have you with us here today. Just minutes ago we had OpenAI on that very seat, and you as a company are perhaps the only partner with them, a services partner with that company. So I'm going to begin this conversation with AI and what it means for the IT services sector, the good and bad really, as you see it, the impact of AI on your industry.
Yes. Thank you for having me here. And as you called out, we are the only services partner, global GSI, for OpenAI. We see tremendous opportunities from an industry perspective. While AI is a very big inflection point for any services industry because knowledge is what is getting commoditized, right? That's really what it is. So the opportunity for us is in two dimensions. One is to transform our existing service footprint using AI. It might mean reduction in revenue in some areas, but we want to be proactively transforming our services. That's something which we are doing proactively. We were one of the first, and our clients have greatly appreciated it. So that will mean some deflation in revenue, but you can also expand your pie because IT services space is a very, very large market. So that's one. The second aspect is AI is also opening up completely new services, completely new areas of discretionary spend which was not the focus of a lot of tech services firms. Like physical AI is a big area, which is about sensing, understanding and acting on physical objects, right? Whether it is warehouse management, remote surgery, or managing safety in mines and ports, all of that can be done very, very efficiently using physical AI solutions today. So we are really focused on completely creating new service lines which are really coming up as an opportunity because of the proliferation of AI.
You know the world has been a very turbulent place for the last three, four, five years. First it was COVID, supply chain disruptions, then there was conflict, now trade. And the IT sector has been caught in the middle of it, of course, because of its size and importance, particularly for India from an industry standpoint. Is the worst over for the IT sector? Because we've seen numbers quarter on quarter from across the sector, and while they tell a story, I want your perspective on that.
I think, of course, if you look at the performance of all the companies, it feels like things have bottomed out and everybody is optimistic, and that's the way I see it as well. It's all about how quickly you can pivot to the new ways of working, right? I think that's where it was not that there was no big opportunities in the industry in the last three, four years. There have been many opportunities, but you have to be very innovative and creative about finding where is the money going and really chasing that and building propositions around that. Like we've been the fastest growing large cap company. It's all around building completely new services, even though they are very small now, but each one of them have a great opportunity to scale. So I think as an industry, we need to look for completely new revenue streams while trying to modernize our existing revenue streams through AI.
So what would you say in response to this question? I, by the way, also put that question to the AI, OpenAI representative who was here with us, which is: will AI kill the back office as we know it?
Yes, the construct of that would look very different. Today it's very people intensive. The way it is evolving, it will be a lot more agentic and really amplify the potential of people to deliver more, but with significantly lesser number of people. To that extent, the back office operations offers the biggest opportunity to be transformed using AI.
Is that the reason perhaps that on a net basis, just and this is a number that I read that just 70 odd jobs have been created by the Indian IT industry, which literally creates tens of thousands of jobs every year for India? I think that's a very skewed statistic. I also saw that couple of days, I mean yesterday, it's probably because one company has significantly reduced headcount and others have increased. I wouldn't read into that. I think some amount of growth, maybe 3 to 5% of growth, is possible without having to add people. By really amplifying the capability of the people, you can deliver 3 to 5% growth without needing to add people. But if you really aspire to grow much more than that, then obviously it'll be very dependent on talent infusion with very high capabilities. In all fairness, we must also recognize that it's not the first technology disruption that India's IT and IT-enabled services behemoths are seeing. This industry didn't become $350 billion just like that. If it started with Y2K, if that's one way of looking at it, it's seen multiple disruptions. And therefore, this current AI disruption, what do you think it will mean in terms of adding to the scale of the revenues of the Indian IT industry? Are you in a position to talk about that? And particularly for your company, what kind of revenues do you see coming in from your AI?
I think for the industry, it's a big opportunity, but not everyone is going to get it because it's not just about transforming your existing services, which is an absolute must to transform all your existing services proactively. If you don't do it, clients will force you to do it. So that's a journey most people are really comfortable doing, and maybe there was a little bit of disbelief a year, couple of years ago, but today everybody recognizes the need to proactively transform their services. But I think it's all about expanding the wallet share. I mean, looking into different markets beyond just the core geographies where we are working and trying to scale the traditional business model, but focus on new service lines which are triggered because of AI. That's where the biggest opportunity is.
And therefore, by when do you think we could see like really robust growth coming back to this sector?
Robust growth, you have to define that.
Define it. Robust growth. You pick a number.
I think, I mean, see, as I said even in the last investor call, the use of technology to transform businesses has never been more intense in the past. This is the biggest. We see huge intensity in trying to transform businesses using technology, whether it is data, cloud, AI, physical AI, all of that. So I think that is, if you kind of go with that, then it's also a big business opportunity. So I do think the industry can grow much faster than what it has been growing in the last three, four years. It's a pivot, and we all have to very quickly pivot to addressing new opportunities while also transforming the existing business.
