AI is Reshaping Enterprise IT & Commercial Models, Says Wipro at 80th AGM

Enterprise AI adoption has entered the execution phase, with clients embedding the technology into core business processes and increasingly moving away from effort-based IT contracts, Wipro's top executives said at the company’s 80th annual general meeting.

“The focus is shifting from experimentation to execution,” Chairman Rishad Premji told shareholders, adding that AI was already altering the nature of work across both operations and technology functions.

In operations, he said, employees were moving away from routine transaction processing towards exception handling, compliance and decision support. In technology, he said AI was changing the economics and speed of software engineering and modernisation, opening up new pools of growth for the industry.

CEO and Managing Director Srini Pallia went further on the commercial implications, saying the AI shift was pushing clients and vendors alike away from effort-based pricing towards consumption-linked, transaction-based and outcome-based contracts. 

“Success in AI is not driven solely by models,” Pallia said, noting that real transformation required integrating domain expertise, data, cloud, security and organisational change management together.”

However, Premji cautioned that turning AI into business outcomes was “easier said than done”, because enterprises carry technology estates and operating models built up over decades within regulatory and operational constraints. For most clients, he said, this would not be a single project but a multi-year transformation journey.

On the financial front, Wipro’s IT services revenue for FY26 came in at $10.5 billion, down 1.6% year-on-year in constant currency terms, as clients stayed cautious on spending through the year even while shifting conversations towards AI and modernisation.

Operating margins for the segment, however, grew 0.2% year-on-year to 17.2% in FY26. In April, Wipro’s board approved a ₹150 billion share buyback, the company’s largest ever, even as it continued investing in AI capabilities, platforms and talent.

Pallia said Wipro has had a dedicated AI-native business and platforms unit since the last quarter, tasked with scaling enterprise-grade agentic AI and building industry-specific platforms. 

The unit will also develop domain-specific small language models meant to lower operating costs for clients, support sovereign AI requirements, and serve as an efficient foundation for deploying specialised agents at scale, he said. 

Wipro has committed $500 million to Wipro Ventures to back frontier startups working on AI, data and security, enabling the company to co-innovate with emerging technology providers, Pallia added.