ET Deep Dive: The Pyramid Problem: Why AI Is Breaking Indian IT’s Winning Formula
7/19/202614 min
Indian IT built its empire on one formula: throw armies of low-cost engineers at repeatable work, and scale relentlessly. That formula survived Y2K, the dot-com crash, and cloud computing. But AI attacks the model’s foundation itself — the cheap, standardized labor that made the industry’s pyramid structure work. In this episode, we trace how Indian IT industrialized itself, why its biggest strength is now becoming a liability, and what happens when top AI talent refuses to work inside rigid, hierarchical systems. We hear from industry analysts and former CEOs on whether IT giants can rebuild their culture fast enough — or whether this disruption is one wave they can’t ride out.
Jochelle Mendonca reports, Anirban Chowdhury narrates for audio.
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First 90 secondsAnirban Chaudhuri· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to ET Deep Dive, ET's best-reported stories on audio. [upbeat music] Today, Joshel Mendonsa writes on whether Indian IT, which has survived every past upheaval, can pivot again now that AI threatens the cheap, repetitive labor model at its very core. [upbeat music] It's Sunday the nineteenth of July. I'm Anirban Chaudhuri. This is the morning brief. [upbeat music] For decades, it seemed Indian IT could only grow. The Y2K bug turbocharged their initial expansion in the late 1990s, and though later waves of changing technologies brought down other companies like Nokia, the Indian IT sector surfed to success. [upbeat music] With every new technology, they pivoted from SMAC, which is social, mobile, analytics, and cloud, to SaaS or software as a service. They trained and retrained hundreds of thousands of employees to deliver what clients wanted. When the risk of commoditization grew, threatening