REDEFINING ENTERPRISE READINESS

The ChatGPT era has triggered a global AI race, driving enterprises and Indian IT firms towards an "AI-ready," human + AI future

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On 30th Nov ‘25, it will be exactly three years since OpenAl launched its generative Al tool, ChatGPT, which sparked off an Al arms race among Big Tech companies like Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta.

What ChatGPT did was demonstrate an Al tool that could instantly converse with users. It determined the meaning of inputs from users, and generated an output quickly, making the experience feel conversational. Essentially, it enabled humans to engage in natural dialogue with a machine - a technological disruption that ChatGPT ushered in.

Since then, OpenAl has made five major upgrades to its GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) model. Alphabet, known for search engine giant Google, responded with Gemini, its most capable and general large language model. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, positioned its LLaMA models as offering more openness than proprietary models.

Among disrupters, OpenAl has raised over $60 billion to date, with Microsoft perched as a strategic investor. Anthropic, which has developed its own generative Al systems called Claude, has raised more than $25 billion in just a couple of years. It counts Amazon and Google as investors, and reported an annualized revenue run rate of $5 billion in August this year.

Altogether, between Al startups and Big Tech, investors have poured over $250 billion into this Al arms race, which is playing out in the US, over the past three years.

For investors in enterprise technology firms in India, the key question they have to discern now is how this technological shift in the US (a market that typically contributes more than 50% of their revenue) will impact the capabilities and competitiveness of enterprises that are the customers of Indian IT.

Traditionally, investors in India have assessed this by comparing Indian IT companies with their global counterparts, most notably Accenture.