AI Will Strengthen India's IT Industry: Anand Mahindra

Mahindra maintained that while AI will reshape the industry, it will not reduce the importance of IT services.

"Instead, the industry's role will become more critical as businesses require trusted partners to deploy AI securely and effectively," Mahindra noted.

He noted that AI has moved beyond being a productivity tool on the periphery of organisations and is now central to how enterprises design work, serve customers, manage risk and make decisions. However, implementing AI at enterprise scale remains far more challenging than simply envisioning its capabilities.

According to Mahindra, most enterprises continue to operate with legacy systems, fragmented data, complex regulations and accumulated technology debt, making AI deployment a sophisticated integration exercise rather than a plug-and-play solution.

He said this is where companies like Tech Mahindra play a crucial role by helping organisations integrate, govern and customise AI in a secure and responsible manner. Comparing AI to a smartphone, Mahindra said the real value lies not in the underlying technology itself but in the applications, connectivity and enterprise solutions built around it.

He further said an enterprise's true competitive advantage, or "alpha", will increasingly come from its proprietary data, business workflows, domain expertise and institutional knowledge. Tech Mahindra's role, he added, is to help clients preserve and enhance that advantage through AI-powered platforms, workflows and solutions.