Indian IT leaders focus on agentic AI for growth, majority of them find AI augmenting talent: Survey

A quiet revolution is underway in India’s boardrooms. Beyond the buzzwords and pilot projects, a decisive shift in artificial intelligence strategy is taking root. According to a recent, significant survey of Indian IT leaders, the focus has crystallised: the future is agentic, and the goal is augmentation. The majority of these leaders no longer view AI as merely a tool for automation or cost-cutting; they see it as a fundamental force for amplifying human talent and unlocking unprecedented growth.

From Assistive to Agentic: Redefining the AI Paradigm

For years, AI in the enterprise largely functioned in an "assistive" capacity. Think of recommendation engines, chatbots for routine queries, or data dashboards. These systems responded to prompts and followed predetermined rules. The emerging focus on Agentic AI represents a profound evolution. Agentic AI refers to systems that can perceive their environment, set goals, make independent decisions, and take actions to achieve those goals with a significant degree of autonomy.

Indian IT leaders, steering a sector renowned for its adaptability and scale, are increasingly betting on this paradigm. They are investing in AI agents that can manage complex workflows—an agent that doesn’t just retrieve a customer’s data but autonomously resolves a service ticket by analysing history, diagnosing issues, and executing solutions across multiple systems. Another might not just generate a report but continuously monitor market conditions, propose strategic adjustments, and even initiate procurement processes. This shift from AI as a "tool" to AI as an "active colleague" is at the heart of the new strategy.

The Primacy of Talent Augmentation

Perhaps the most compelling insight from the survey is the overwhelming consensus that AI’s primary role is to augment human talent, not replace it. A majority of leaders expressed this view, signalling a mature and strategic approach to workforce transformation.

This focus on augmentation addresses two critical challenges in the Indian IT landscape:

The Scale-Quality Conundrum: The industry manages vast, complex global delivery while battling attrition and skill gaps. Agentic AI acts as a force multiplier for existing talent. A junior developer, augmented by an AI agent capable of writing boilerplate code, debugging, and suggesting architecture improvements, can produce output at a senior level. A financial analyst, paired with an agent that can synthesise real-time global market data, regulatory changes, and company performance, can provide insights previously impossible at speed.

Upskilling at Scale: Rather than rendering skills obsolete, agentic AI is being deployed to accelerate upskilling. AI agents act as personalised mentors and co-pilots, guiding employees through new technologies, frameworks, and problem-solving approaches in real-time. This creates a continuous learning loop, elevating the entire workforce’s capabilities and making them more strategic.

As one surveyed CTO noted, "Our greatest asset is our people’s problem-solving intuition and client-facing creativity. Agentic AI frees them from the mundane, allowing them to focus on what humans do best: innovation, empathy, and complex judgment."

Strategic Drivers: Growth Beyond Efficiency

The pivot to agentic AI is not driven by a desire for marginal efficiency gains alone. The survey indicates a clear link to broader growth agendas:

Product Innovation: IT service companies are building AI-driven products and platforms. Product engineering teams, augmented by agentic AI, can accelerate design cycles, simulate outcomes, and personalise offerings at scale, creating new revenue streams.

Hyper-Personalised Client Solutions: In a competitive market, differentiation is key. Agents can analyse a client’s unique ecosystem and continuously optimise service delivery, creating sticky, value-based partnerships rather than transactional contracts.

Resilient and Autonomous Operations: Agentic systems that predict and mitigate cybersecurity threats, manage cloud infrastructure costs autonomously, or ensure regulatory compliance across jurisdictions create a more resilient and efficient operation, protecting the bottom line and reputation.

The Implementation Landscape: Ambition Meets Challenge

The survey, however, also reveals the terrain Indian leaders must navigate. The ambition for agentic AI is clear, but the path is strewn with both technical and human challenges.

Technical Hurdles:

Integration Complexity: Deploying autonomous agents requires seamless integration with legacy systems, robust data pipelines, and impeccable data governance. The "agentic layer" must work across siloed enterprise applications.

Trust and Reliability: Ensuring these agents make sound, explainable decisions is paramount. Leaders are investing in oversight mechanisms, ethical AI frameworks, and rigorous testing environments ("simulation worlds") before full deployment.

Cost and Expertise: Building and maintaining such advanced systems requires significant investment in specialised talent—prompt engineers, AI ethicists, and systems architects—and in computational infrastructure.

Human-Centric Challenges:

Cultural Adoption: The success of augmentation hinges on employee trust and adoption. Leaders emphasise change management, transparent communication, and involving employees in the design of AI workflows to combat fear and build ownership.

Redefined Roles: Job descriptions are evolving. The survey highlights a surge in demand for roles like "AI Trainer," "Process Orchestrator," and "Human-AI Integration Manager." The focus is on skills that leverage AI: critical thinking, ethical judgment, creativity, and emotional intelligence.

The New Leadership Imperative: Leading an augmented workforce requires a new managerial lexicon. Leaders must learn to set goals for human-AI teams, assess composite performance, and foster a culture of human-machine collaboration.

The Road Ahead: Building an Augmented Future

The survey of Indian IT leaders paints a picture of a sector at an inflexion point. The vision is clear: a future where agentic AI and human talent form symbiotic teams, tackling problems of greater complexity and scale than ever before.

This is not a passive, wait-and-watch approach. It is an active shaping of the future. Indian IT, with its deep experience in global delivery, process excellence, and now, its assertive embrace of agentic augmentation, is positioning itself not just as a consumer of AI technology, but as a pioneer in defining its most productive and human-centric application.

The conclusion is inescapable. The majority of Indian IT leaders have moved beyond the debate on AI replacement. Their strategy is now centred on a powerful synthesis: leveraging agentic AI to augment talent and thereby fuel sustainable, intelligent growth. In this synthesis lies the potential to redefine the global value proposition of Indian IT, transforming it from the world’s back-office to its premier AI-augmented innovation partner.