Innovation
As agentic AI automates the man-day billing model, the $300 billion outsourcing industry faces a brutal pivot.
On February 4, the $300 billion Indian IT sector faced a moment of reckoning.
The country’s benchmark IT stocks index slumped nearly 6%, reacting to Anthropic’s release of its Claude Cowork agentic plugin.
The new plugins are designed to automate precisely the high-volume, repetitive knowledge work that has been the bread and butter of Indian IT: contract reviews, regulatory compliance tracking, and sales forecasting, among other things. The stock sell-off was triggered by fears that clients could now use AI for such tasks instead of outsourcing them to companies in India.
