As Anthropic’s Claude Mythos threatens to disrupt cybersecurity research and expose vulnerabilities, India's IT services industry is racing to turn AI-native cybersecurity into its next big growth engine.
Wipro recently expanded its cybersecurity partnership with Palo Alto Networks to run AI-driven threat detection out of its global security centres. According to Simone Gammeri, Senior VP and Chief Partnership Officer at Palo Alto Networks, “AI-manufactured attacks now require an AI-powered defence.”
Wipro is not alone.
In May, Infosys completed a ₹532 crore all-cash acquisition of Australian cybersecurity firm The Missing Link. Earlier this year, Tech Mahindra tied up with data-security firm Rubrik on AI-powered ransomware recovery. Meanwhile, TCS, HCLTech, Infosys, and Wipro have all signed on to CrowdStrike's Project QuiltWorks, a global coalition to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities uncovered by advanced AI systems such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
US firm Chainguard has separately expanded partnerships with TCS, Infosys, HCLTech, LTIMindtree, and Persistent, letting each embed pre-hardened, continuously scanned software components directly into client applications.
Industry experts say the pattern points to a structural shift, not a burst of opportunistic deal-making.
"For the larger part of the last decade, cybersecurity sat within Indian IT as a feature. It has now become a significantly more critical capability for organisations and hence an important growth engine for IT firms in its own right," Nisha Bachani, Managing Director and Partner at BCG, tells AIM.
The opportunity also arises amid a wave of cybersecurity spending across corporate India. According to the Data Security Council of India, cybersecurity investments have surged 30% year-on-year as companies move to protect data, digital operations, and AI systems.
AI on Both Sides of the Fight
Artificial intelligence has simultaneously become the weapon of choice for attackers and the only viable tool for defenders to keep pace.
Shikhil Sharma, Founder of cybersecurity firm Astra Security, links this directly to the AI coding boom. As the volume of code being shipped inside enterprises has grown multifold, so have the vulnerabilities.
"More code, more infrastructure, means more vulnerabilities, more attack surfaces," Sharma says, adding that security testing that once ran quarterly or annually now has to happen at the pace at which code is written.
On the defence side, the response has been to embed AI at the core of security operations rather than treat it as an add-on. That shift is visible most starkly in CrowdStrike's Project QuiltWorks, which TCS, Wipro, HCLTech, and Infosys have joined to plug their delivery networks directly into frontier-model-powered vulnerability discovery.
“The AI security crisis will be mitigated by those who are prepared to prioritise, orchestrate, remediate at machine speed. CrowdStrike's Project QuiltWorks and Wipro Intelligence anchor our partnership at the point where AI governance, runtime security, and managed operations converge,” Satish Yadavalli, Global Business Head, Cloud, Infrastructure, and Security Services at Wipro, said in a statement announcing the partnership.
TCS struck a similar note, saying frontier AI models are "identifying hidden vulnerabilities and significantly shortening response and remediation timelines" for enterprises.
Bachani said the BFSI sector illustrates how quickly the threat perception has shifted. BCG's report, Cybersecurity in the Age of AI, found that 76% of Indian BFSI leaders now rank AI-related attacks as a top concern, against 61% globally, with AI-enabled social engineering the single most-cited threat category they are actively building defences against.
“AI now sits on both sides of the equation at once: a more potent weapon in the hands of attackers, and at the same time a new attack surface that enterprises must defend. Both create demand,” she says, pointing to risks such as model abuse, prompt injection, shadow AI, and a sharp rise in machine identities that legacy security tools were never built to govern.
Regulatory Angle
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), in its latest Financial Stability Report, flagged AI-enabled cyber threats as the leading perceived risk. The central bank advised banks to put in place a board-approved risk management framework covering all models, including those for AI and machine learning.
Moreover, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act mandates strict cybersecurity measures, including mandatory encryption, access controls, and data breach reporting to the Data Protection Board of India.
Lagna Panda, Partner at AP & Partners, says the shift is as much regulatory as commercial.
"Cybersecurity is no longer a localised IT concern and is evolving into a critical governance mandate given the financial, operational and reputational risks posed by cyber incidents," she notes, adding that AI integration is creating new categories of compliance exposure—training-data breaches, model manipulation, automated supply-chain vulnerabilities—that most governance frameworks were not built to anticipate. She expects targeted regulation to follow.
For IT firms looking to capture the opportunity, she believes "demonstrable technical security capabilities" will matter more than positioning.
Bachani, however, cautions that not every player chasing this wave will capture equal value. Reselling a partner's product, she says, has become table stakes rather than a differentiator.
“The real differentiation, and the margin, comes from the platform, the AI-led automation, and the talent built around those products. Firms that treat cybersecurity as a product and IP business will accelerate ahead of those treating it as a reseller play.”
A Hedge for Jobs with a Catch
As AI automates coding, testing, and maintenance work, the bread and butter of traditional Indian IT services, cybersecurity is emerging as a credible new source of both revenue and higher-value employment.
However, Bachani cautions against reading it as a straightforward job cushion. "Cybersecurity will not absorb displaced developers one for one. The skills are different, and security operations are themselves being automated," she highlights.
The roles that will grow, she expects, are security engineers, AI security specialists, threat hunters, and people who supervise and tune autonomous systems—fewer people doing higher-judgement work.
For an industry whose valuations have been weighed down by clients' reduced dependence on large offshore coding teams, cybersecurity offers a durable, regulation-backed, AI-driven demand cycle built on recurring revenue rather than one-off projects.
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