Puneet Chandok, President of Microsoft India and South Asia, may have put himself at the risk of sounding repetitive, but he wanted to drive one point home.
Speaking to a room of a dozen-odd media professionals, along with leaders from Microsoft and India’s IT industry, Chandok repeatedly returned to one finding from Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index, which states that India’s advantage in the AI era is human.
The India edition of this year’s report revealed that 63% of Indian AI users ranked quality control of AI output as an increasingly important skill, the highest among the markets studied, while 59% pointed to critical thinking. Globally, those figures stood at 50% and 46%, respectively.
Meanwhile, 87% of Indian respondents said they remain responsible for the thinking and treat AI output as a starting point rather than a final answer.
The report, based on a survey of 20,000 AI users across 10 markets, alongside trillions of anonymised Microsoft 365 productivity signals, found that India is also ahead in the emergence of what Microsoft calls ‘Frontier Professionals’ the employees who use AI agents for multi-step workflows and redesign how work gets done around them.
In India, 32% of AI users fall into this category, twice the global average and the highest share among the markets studied. The report also found that 78% of Indian AI users said AI was enabling work that was not possible a year ago, compared with 58% globally.
The report and its findings come at a time when the discourse around India’s IT industry has taken a markedly different turn since 2022.
Putting the Fears to Rest?
As generative AI became more capable and agentic systems began moving from answering questions to executing tasks, concerns grew around whether some of the work that has traditionally powered India’s technology-services industry could eventually be automated.
“I do want to put the fears to rest,” Chandok told AIM in an interaction. “India is becoming the frontier, and a lot of this is driven by Indian IT services companies, new roles being created, and enterprises need a lot of help to translate these models into real value.”
Chandok’s comments come as Indian IT companies begin to show signs that AI is becoming a meaningful part of their business, rather than remaining a technology experiment.
Tata Consultancy Services reported annualised AI revenue of $2.6 billion in Q1 FY27, up 13.6% quarter-on-quarter. Its quarterly contract value stood at $9.5 billion, including an $800 million AI-led transformation deal with SKF.
TCS added roughly 9,300 employees during the quarter, taking its workforce to 5,93,798. This also marked the fastest quarterly hiring pace in more than three years. The company said the hiring included engineers with AI capabilities.
The AI push has also extended into larger engagements. In August, TCS announced a five-year strategic partnership with Porsche to deploy AI across manufacturing, engineering, operations and customer experience.
As part of the deal, TCS will acquire Porsche’s IT consulting subsidiary MHP for €320 million, while the broader partnership is valued at €1.25 billion.
HCLTech’s Advanced AI business grew 62.1% year-on-year to $171 million.
Infosys, meanwhile, said AI revenues accounted for 8.2% of its Q1 FY27 revenue, while large-deal TCV reached $3.6 billion. It also hired more than 4,000 graduates during the quarter and plans to recruit around 20,000 in FY27.
In July, Infosys also announced plans to hire around 6,000 Forward Deployment Engineers over the coming years—a role aimed at taking AI capabilities into enterprise environments and deploying them against specific business problems.
“All our jobs are a bundle of tasks. AI is unbundling it. We’ll all have a portfolio of things to do. But the colour of what you and I do, every function, every role, every industry is being reinvented,” Chandok said.
What About Sovereignty?
Microsoft’s definition of a frontier professional points to a deeper shift. These are not simply employees using chatbots to speed up existing tasks, but workers using AI agents for multi-step workflows and redesigning work around them.
That also means deeper integration of AI tools into enterprise technology stacks, many of which are built on platforms and models originating in the US. It raises a question for India’s sovereign AI ambitions: does sovereignty mean owning every layer of the stack, or having enough control, choice and trust over the technology that businesses and governments build on?
“I think sovereignty today is less about geography and more about trust,” Chandok said. “Sovereignty is about which is the stack that you trust to build on.”
Chandok ties the argument to the company’s push to expand cloud and AI infrastructure in India. The company says its fourth cloud region in the country is now live and that its sovereign public and private cloud offerings are available to Indian customers. It has committed $20.5 billion to India through 2029, including $17.5 billion announced in December 2025.
The Reasons Behind the Numbers
Moreover, Chandok’s explanation for India’s position in the report, however, comes down to three factors: its large developer base, access to AI tools and the willingness of its workforce to learn and build with them.
“We always had the starting point of the raw material. We have 27 million developers today on GitHub. India is one of the largest developer ecosystems in the world,” he said.
The next factor, he said, was access to tools, pointing to the widespread deployment of Copilot across TCS, Wipro, Infosys and LTIMindtree. The third was the appetite among Indian developers and technologists to learn AI and use it to move into higher-value work.
“If you’re truly at the cutting edge of AI, using it in everything you do, AI will not replace your job. AI might take some parts of it away, which you anyway didn’t like—the grunt work,” says Chandok. “The next generation is a lot more AI native. We give them less credit than they deserve. I believe it’s a much more optimistic world they’re entering.”
The Mixed Reality
Having said that, the optimism around AI does not make the employment concerns unfounded, as the evidence from India is already mixed.
AI-related hiring in the IT sector rose 16% year-on-year in June, even as overall IT hiring fell 3%, according to the Naukri JobSpeak report.
TCS, meanwhile, cut more than 23,000 employees on a net basis in FY26, with its chairman saying AI agents would eventually reduce the need for large-scale hiring—even as the company added around 9,300 employees in Q1 FY27, when its annualised AI revenue reached $2.6 billion.
The pressure is particularly acute at the entry-level roles. A June study by Cognizant and Pearson found that AI was already performing 37% of entry-level tasks in India, above the global average of 33%. And while the same study found that new roles are emerging around managing and interpreting AI output, it also points to a fundamental shift in what companies expect from their youngest workers.
“The future is positive, but I think we have to be clear-eyed there’s a transition,” Chandok said. “We have to build new skills. We have to think about new commercial models, outcomes, and some of these new capabilities among engineers.”
That is perhaps the more complicated reality of India’s AI transition. The technology is creating new work, new roles and new sources of revenue, but it is also making some existing work, particularly routine, entry-level work, less valuable.
India’s advantage may indeed be its ability to adapt to that shift, but whether it can do so fast enough to ensure that the jobs created by AI keep pace with the jobs and tasks it displaces remains an open question.
Your reaction
Discussion
What's your take on this story?
No comments yet — be the first to share your view.