New Delhi, Feb 20 (PTI) Industry leaders on Friday deliberated on the impact of artificial intelligence on SaaS and enterprise services at the India AI Impact Summit and how the technology could reshape the nature of the IT industry.
The panellists evinced a collective message: AI agents will reshape business and operating models, but they will not render them obsolete overnight.
They emphasised that success in the AI era will hinge on agility, enterprise readiness, orchestration, and above all, the ability to continuously solve real customer problems in increasingly complex digital ecosystems, according to an official release.
Addressing concerns over sharp market reactions to AI tools, including speculation around the future of SaaS, Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson & CEO of Salesforce India, cautioned against oversimplification.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a cloud-based model in which applications are delivered over the internet for a subscription, rather than installed and maintained on legacy computers or servers at client premises. “Markets will say a lot of things, and not all of it comes true,” she noted.
“When you talk about the SaaS model, it’s not only about vibe coding or creating an application, it’s about understanding workflows, recognising customer pain points, and ensuring you address them. It’s about observability, governance, auditability, and adoption,” she said.
From a services perspective, K Krithivasan, Chief Executive Officer of Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest IT services company, emphasised a fundamental shift in the role of engineers.
“We are entering an era where the role of the software engineer is shifting toward high-level architecture and rigorous validation,” he said. While AI promises immense productivity gains, enterprise adoption requires significant groundwork, from data rationalisation to application modernisation, he stressed.
Instead of contraction, he said he foresees expansion of the market and its many opportunities. “We don’t envision a shrinking of the sector, but rather a massive explosion in the volume of what can be produced and the complexity of the problems we can solve.”
C Vijayakumar, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of HCL Technologies, asserted that enterprise AI adoption demands more than generic models. “Large language models and foundational models cannot yet be applied most efficiently to enterprise use cases,” he said, noting a persistent gap between foundational capabilities and enterprise-grade performance.
HCL Technologies is building intellectual property and specialised services, including physical AI and agentic AI, to bridge that gap and scale adoption, even if that means proactively evolving existing business lines.
Infosys Chief Executive OfficerSalil Parekh underscored the scale of opportunity ahead. “AI is creating a USD300 billion services opportunity by making the ‘impossible’ economically viable.” T
he panel discussion came against the backdrop of the market’s growing unease over SaaS firms’ model as AI agents threaten to automate core workflows, cut dependence on traditional software subscriptions, and pressurise margins.
The shift toward outcome-based AI solutions has raised concerns about pricing pressure and disruption from AI-native competitors and tools.
