AI agents: India could become the world's agent factory
- Ade McCormack
- Aug 12
- 3 min read
The signal
India became a global technology powerhouse by supplying skilled people to design, build and run the information systems of organisations around the world. Now the same industry is moving rapidly into agentic AI. Infosys has launched an Agentic AI Foundry and says an AI-first services opportunity worth $300–400 billion could emerge by 2030. Wipro has created an AI-Native Business & Platforms unit for what it calls a “services as software” world. TCS is developing offerings to help clients move towards AI-native autonomous operating models. The signal is not simply that Indian IT firms are adopting AI. They may be positioning themselves to industrialise the creation and deployment of digital labour.
What are we seeing?
For decades, the Indian IT services model was built around an extraordinary capability: mobilising large pools of technical talent and applying them to the technology needs of global organisations. The model ranged from software development and systems integration to application maintenance, infrastructure management and business-process services.
Agentic AI changes the unit of delivery. Instead of assigning another person to a task, a provider may increasingly be able to assign an AI agent, or a coordinated group of agents. Infosys says its Agentic AI Foundry includes reusable components and pre-built horizontal and vertical agents. Wipro has reported building 200 production-ready agents with Google Cloud and is embedding agentic workflows across functions including IT, HR, procurement and cybersecurity. TCS is similarly working with Google Cloud on agentic and autonomous systems intended to support faster decision-making across business and IT functions.
This suggests a potentially important transition: from exporting human technology capacity to exporting packaged, scalable cognitive capacity.
What does it mean?
The traditional outsourcing proposition has largely been an arbitrage model: access capable people at a lower cost, wrap them in industrialised processes and deliver the service at scale. AI weakens the importance of labour-cost arbitrage because the marginal cost of additional digital labour can be dramatically lower than that of additional human labour.
At first sight, that looks like a threat to India’s technology-services industry. But it may also be an opportunity. The large Indian providers already possess global client relationships, domain knowledge, delivery disciplines, governance experience and enormous pools of technical talent. Those capabilities can potentially be redirected from managing armies of people towards designing, training, orchestrating and governing armies of agents.
The winners may therefore be those that move fastest from selling effort to selling outcomes. In that world, the asset is no longer primarily the number of people available to do the work. It is the provider’s ability to turn accumulated knowledge into reliable digital capabilities that can be deployed repeatedly across clients and industries.
Why does it matter?
If this transition gathers pace, it could reshape both the global IT services market and the economics of knowledge work. A provider that once needed thousands of people to serve a large client may be able to deliver increasing amounts of work through combinations of people, platforms and autonomous agents.
That would put pressure on business models based on headcount, utilisation and billable hours. It would also blur the boundary between a services company and a software company. Wipro’s phrase ‘services as software’ captures the direction of travel particularly well.
More profoundly, India could become an important production centre not simply for technology but for artificial cognition: reusable agents capable of sensing information, making bounded decisions and taking action inside organisations. The world’s next great outsourcing wave may therefore involve cognition rather than labour.
What should leaders consider?
Leaders should be careful not to treat this simply as another chapter in outsourcing. The strategic question is not whether an external provider can supply cheaper AI agents than an internal team. It is where organisational cognition should reside.
As agents become embedded in operational and decision-making workflows, organisations will need to decide which cognitive capabilities are differentiating, which can safely be sourced externally and how externally supplied agents are governed.
Outsourcing a process is one thing. Outsourcing part of the organisation’s capacity to sense, decide and act is something more fundamental.
India may indeed become the world’s agent factory. The more important question for leaders is how much of their organisation’s intelligence they are prepared to buy from it.