Indian IT and AI’s dawn

WHILE AI MAY STILL BE GUESSING, INDIAN IT HAS ALWAYS KNOWN EXACTLY WHAT IT'S DOING

- SIDDHARTH PAI Technology consultant and venture capitalist By invitation

THERE'S A MOMENT in every technology's evolution when the hype recedes, the buzzwords wear thin, and the real work begins. In 2026, artificial intelligence (AI) will be smack in the middle of that phase. Companies, after months of breathless pronouncements and budget-blowing experiments, are beginning to realise that AI, especially the wildly popular and highly unpredictable generative AI (GenAI), is less a magic wand and more a very sharp, somewhat wobbly tool that needs careful handling.

Indian IT service providers find themselves at the centre of this unfolding drama. They didn't build the AI models, those came from labs in Silicon Valley, Seattle, and a few stealthy startups elsewhere, but they will be the ones asked to integrate these models into the Rube Goldberg machines that are modern enterprise systems. And in many ways, they're well suited to the task. After all, if you've spent decades coaxing legacy mainframes to speak to cloud native applications, managing multilingual databases, and smoothing the wrinkles out of a compliance workflow last updated when Nokia still made phones, AI integration might actually seem... manageable.