Artificial Intelligence: India Inc’s Inflection Point

 PIRAMAL FINANCE IS among the large non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) of India with a market capitalisation around ₹40,000 crore. A few months ago, the team of its CEO Jairam Sridharan told him that they needed a par­ticular software for operations and were looking at getting it from the market. He soon forgot about it until early February when he was suddenly sent an invite for the demo with the update that the software was going to go live soon after. He was astonished at the speed of what had happened. His team told him that after exploring the market, they had just decided to create the software themselves. When they asked providers, they were told that it would take between six to nine months and the cost would be ₹12 crore. Instead, with the help of an AI model called Claude, they had been able to do it themselves at ₹1 crore. Writing on LinkedIn, Sridharan expressed his amazement: “A tenth of the cost. Less than a third of the time. Specifically built for our purpose. Good enough to go live with. Just 3.5 software engineers.”

AI is no longer waiting on the horizon to be exploited or to disrupt Indian businesses. It is already happening in leaps. In 2025, the Confederation of Indian Industry and Ernst & Young came out with a report that found Indian businesses were moving from ex­perimentation to implementation in AI and termed the landscape as reaching an inflection point. Their press release said, “Nearly half of Indian enterprises (47%) now have multiple Generative AI (GenAI) use cases live while 23% are in pilot stage—marking a decisive shift from pilots to performance. Indian enterprises are demonstrating strong confidence by embedding AI into core business workflows to deliver measurable results. Notably, 76% of business leaders believe that GenAI will have a significant business impact, and 63% feel ready to leverage it effectively.”

Take the biggest NBFC company in India, Bajaj Finance. It re­cently released its third-quarter numbers, and the conference call on February 3 with investors made everyone sit up with surprise at the scale of AI usage by the company. The company was reveal­ing this metric for the first time, tracking implementation and benefits. AI had converted voice to text for 20 million customer interaction calls that the company made, turning it into useful data. Its Managing Director Rajeev Jain said at the call, “Text-to-data conversion happened for 5.2 lakh customers. And as a result of that, we generated 100,000 new offers on which we did not have information earlier. So how you’re seeing it move is that the first capability did not exist in Q1 and Q2. It just got deployed. So, we’ll be able to listen to 100 million calls next year, and we’ll be able to convert voice to text as we move forward, in the beginning for sales, then for service and then for DMS.”

They had 11 AI text BOTs which were replacing SMSes, which meant that it wasn’t a one-way communication but an interaction with customers. Another area using AI was face recognition and making onboarding easier. They did 46 million face matches to verify customers coming in. The information from 43 documents like PAN and Aadhaar could be automatically filled in for custom­ers because the AI could extract from images with 95-96 per cent accuracy. It was in the company’s primary business loans that the figure was startling. AI call centres were doing around 10 per cent of it. “The loan disbursements through AI call centre came in at ₹1,600- odd crore. Data converting—data from those calls led to another ₹325 crore of volumes,” said Jain.

Other sectors are also using AI though it might not be apparent to the end-user. When someone orders from a quick-commerce app, all they know is that they are getting their groceries within minutes. But behind that is an AI infrastructure managing the process. In the India AI Impact Summit, one of the participants is Zepto, which set up a mini dark store in the convention centre that would deliver products to delegates in minutes. Revealing this on social media, Zepto’s co-founder Aadit Palicha wrote, “At the centre connecting each exhibition hall, you will find our store and delivery team, along with a showcase of real AI use cases in our business that have reduced opex costs and increased revenue.” He also elaborated on the ways in which the company was using AI—self-learning forecasting algorithms to run the supply chain, automated image analysis in customer support, and generating advertising revenue through AI-powered tools for brand partners. Meanwhile, Eternal, the leader in quick commerce, has just announced a tie-up with OpenAI to enhance AI integration into its companies under its fold, like Zomato and Blinkit.

Last November, SAP, the enterprise application software and business AI company, conducted a study of AI adoption in businesses by surveying 1,600 business leaders in eight countries, including 200 from India. They found that 93 per cent of Indian organisations expected positive returns on AI investment in three years, the highest level of confidence recorded among all countries surveyed. Some of the report’s key findings were: “Majority of businesses expect AI to be central to business processes, decision making, and customer offerings by 2030 with only 3% saying otherwise. Most businesses are scaling AI automation and ex­perimenting with generative AI leading to AI supporting 23% business tasks today, rising to 41% in 2 years. AI has helped 36% of businesses address key challenges, driving better insights (44%), greater innovation (37%), and stronger customer engagement (36%). 78% are integrating AI into workforce planning through upskilling and reskilling to enable an AI-powered future.”

AI is however also becoming a force of enormous disruption, and this became all too evident recently when Anthropic released Cowork, a set of tools for its model Claude, allowing it to access data from users and work on it. A few weeks later, they launched plugins for Cowork that now tailored its abilities for specific functions. As the company explained in a blog, “A sales plugin, for example, could connect Claude to your CRM and knowledge base, teach it your sales process, and give you commands for everything from prospect research to call follow ups. You define what goes in the plugin once, and Claude pulls from that context whenever it’s relevant.” But these were precisely the kind of services that IT companies were offering. The markets responded violently, wiping hundreds of billions of dollars off their valuations. Indian IT companies like Infosys, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) too saw their stock prices dropping steeply. These companies go under the label of Software as a Service (SaaS), and a new word was coined for AI’s impact on them—SaaSocalypse.

It had been known for a while that given the speed with which AI was getting better at coding, IT companies might be in for dras­tic impact. The release of Cowork has become the trigger to bring those fears to the surface. It was no longer a distant outcome but a present danger. On the other hand, Indian IT companies are already preparing for this makeover. After their second-quarter results last October, TCS CEO K Krithivasan stated, “We are on a journey to be­come the world’s largest AI-led technology services company. Our journey is anchored in bold transformation across talent, infrastruc­ture, ecosystem partnerships and customer value. The investments, including the building of a world-class AI infrastructure business, demonstrate our commitment to this transformation.” Infosys has just announced a tie-up on February 17 with Anthropic. It would begin in “telecommunications with a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence to build and deploy AI agents tailored to industry-specific operations. The collaboration will further expand across industries, including financial services, manufacturing, and soft­ware development.” When the market heard the news, Infosys stock prices went up.

Given the relationships built with clients over decades and the necessity for businesses to have providers performing their func­tions, it is possible that Indian IT companies might re-emerge in a new AI-driven form, but it will be a different matter for those cur­rently employed there. Software programming is not going to need the numbers currently employed, and the earlier body-shopping model seems likely to become redundant. But when a new technol­ogy comes, jobs are created, and an entire skilled workforce will be needed just as it was when IT got going. India and Indian companies will need to manage this transition.

AI might also be able to support Indian businesses in weak areas like innovation, as an article by the International Monetary Fund in January argued. It said that nearly 60 per cent of Indian firms already use some form of AI—well above global averages—and added, “AI can make businesses more efficient, speed up technology diffusion, and strengthen innovation.”