Bengaluru’s IT giants must wake up to the Al storm or risk obsolescence

I first visited Bengaluru in the 1990s, when its airport was a modest structure with a single civilian runway and the roads were seemingly empty. The city felt like a frontier outpost. Its IT leaders were hungry and ambitious, willing to jump on any opportunity presented to them. They believed they could change the world—and they did.

- Vivek Wadhwa

Fast forward three decades. The airport is now a gleaming global hub, the traffic is legendary, and Bengaluru has become synonymous with IT. But when I meet the same leaders who once built this powerhouse, I hear nostalgia rather than vision. They reminisce about their past triumphs, but when I propose radical projects that could save lives and reduce suffering, I get only excuses for why they cannot — or will not — do more.

Look up at the Bengaluru sky and you can literally see the dark clouds of change on the horizon. Artificial intelligence is reshaping industries at a pace even Silicon Valley finds dizzying. Yet the IT veterans act as if these clouds will pass, just as previous storms have. At a recent Infosys Instep celebration, Nandan Nilekani, Narayana Murthy, and Salil Parekh chuckled that obituaries have been written for the IT industry before, and it has always survived. True—but this time the threat is existential.

In my book From Incremental to Exponential, I explained why the complacency of incumbents almost always ends in disaster. Once-dominant Fortune 500 companies become “toast’—roadkill on the highway of technological change—because they mistake momentum for immortality. Think of Kodak, which invented the digital camera but died protecting its film business. Or Nokia, once the king of mobile phones, blindsided by Apple. Or Blockbuster, laughing at Netflix until it became a case study in arrogance. Everything looks fine until it suddenly isn’t.