SaaSpocalypse

Agentic automation repercussions worry industry

- Naini Thaker & Payal Ganguly

INDIA’S TECHNOLOGY SECTOR has entered a volatile period following Anthropic’s rollout of Claude Cowork—positioned as an enterprise-ready “digital worker” capable of autonomously executing multi-step professional tasks. Introduced on January 16 and expanded with 11 workflow plugins later, the tool has drawn attention for its ability to perform several categories of work traditionally handled by large offshore teams.

The market response was immediate. On February 3 and 4, the Nifty IT index posted its sharpest decline since the pandemic years, with leading firms such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCLTech, LTIMindtree and Coforge registering meaningful single-day losses. In total, close to ₹2 lakh crore in market value was erased, reflecting investor concerns about how agentic automation may influence demand for outsourcing and enterprise software services. Investment bank Jefferies described the moment as a “SaaSpocalypse”.

Cutting against the panic, former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka argued the AI shift isn’t abrupt but long in the making. In an X post on February 4, he wrote that calling today’s AI disruption “sudden makes me smile,” noting he’s spent “28+ years” across software and AI. He framed the impact as uneven, borrowing Melanie Mitchell’s “jagged frontier” to explain why routine, well-defined work is accelerating first while judgement-heavy tasks remain harder to automate.