Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, said the rise of AI has changed the way work is experienced, breaking free from the endless repetition symbolised by the Greek myth of Sisyphus.
He said as per the myth, Sisyphus is condemned to push a rock uphill only to see it roll back down. That’s what work felt like for many of us. Endless, repetitive, never truly done. “But with AI and technology… we’re not Sisyphus anymore.”
At the Microsoft Work Trend Index event in Noida, Chandok said that Indian enterprises are preparing to adopt AI agents at scale. According to him, 93% of leaders believe these agents will become part of the workforce in the next 12 to 18 months.
He said that AI agents will soon become digital teammates. “It’s becoming a companion, a teammate, a colleague for me before any meeting I go to,” Chandok said, citing his own experience. According to him, Copilot can now provide contextual information and work across Microsoft 365 apps.
Indian IT and New Job Roles
About the impact of AI on IT jobs, Chandok said the workforce requires rewiring instead of restructuring. He said that AI is creating new roles such as “agent orchestrator, AI workflow designer, and system optimiser.”
Chandok said the future lies in skilling. “All of us need to be AI fluent. We need to know how to work with these tools, build agents, and get digital colleagues to work for us.”
He said the Indian IT companies seem well-positioned. “Five million people are deployed across IT services in India. We’re partnering with Cognizant, HCLTech, Infosys, LTI Mindtree. Microsoft brings the best AI stack, and IT services bring domain expertise and access to customers. Together, the future is bright.”
Echoing the sentiment at a recent event, Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and chairman of Infosys, dismissed concerns about the future of Indian IT, saying the sector has often been prematurely written off but continues to remain resilient. He stressed that both Infosys and the wider industry are well-placed to thrive in the AI era.
Nilekani added that such “obituaries” for the Indian IT have surfaced repeatedly in the past whenever a major technology shift was underway, while expressing confidence in Infosys’ and the wider sectors’ capabilities to adapt to AI and utilise it for growth of business.
How Indian IT Firms Are Deploying AI
Beyond optimism, companies are already reshaping internal systems and workflows with AI. At Microsoft’s event, LTIMindtree’s CIO, Rajesh Kumar R, said the company is embedding AI into daily employee systems, adding, “Our vision is to provide every employee with a digital companion right from onboarding.”
Cognizant’s global solutioning head, Poornima Sathy, pointed to a workforce-wide effort. “Through our Synapse program, we’ve made a bold commitment to empower 1 million people with AI fluency globally.”
She added that when the company designs workflows, it brings together human effort, automation, generative AI agents, autonomous agents, and even ambient intelligence.
Besides that, Cognizant is bullish on vibe coding and has partnered with Lovable. In a post on X, Lovable CEO Anton Osika said, “Cognizant is now Lovable’s largest enterprise customer, a 340,000-person global technology services company.”
Cognizant aims to generate 50% of its code using AI within a year and states it has already achieved 20% of that target. The company has already trained 35,000 developers on GitHub Copilot through its Synapse skilling program and plans to train an additional 40,000 developers.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is actively advancing its AI capabilities by forming a new AI and Services Transformation unit led by Amit Kapur. This unit consolidates all existing AI teams and capabilities within TCS, including the previously separated AI & data unit, to provide a unified, strategic focus on AI-driven innovation and digital transformation for its clients.
This comes after the company announced plans to cut over 12,000 jobs, primarily affecting mid and senior management levels, which is about 2% of its global workforce.
The Indian IT company recently inaugurated a Google Cloud Gemini Experience Centre at its Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) Innovation Lab in Bengaluru. The facility will enable financial institutions to explore AI capabilities, co-create solutions, and prototype applications by combining the company’s domain expertise with Google Cloud technologies.
Similarly, Wipro recently teamed up with Google Cloud to roll out 200 production-ready generative AI agents across sectors such as healthcare, banking, insurance, retail, manufacturing, and IT solutions.
HCLTech is leading India’s IT sector in AI. Last quarter, the company entered into a multi-year partnership with OpenAI, making it the only major Indian IT firm with direct access to ChatGPT’s portfolio. Apoorv Iyer, global head of GenAI practice at HCLTech, said the tie-up is a turning point and the impact is threefold.
“We were the only large SI chosen after a technical assessment,” Iyer told AIM. “The focus is on capability building, adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise, creating strong technical AI solutions with OpenAI, and taking them to customers in healthcare, manufacturing, and BFSI.”
The Road Ahead
Indian IT companies are betting on AI agents as the next growth driver, with Microsoft at the centre of enterprise adoption. But the transition will require reskilling millions of workers, balancing efficiency gains with job security, and ensuring India’s IT edge remains global.
Chandok said India’s fast AI adoption is being driven by its young workforce, strong digital infrastructure, and a thriving ecosystem of startups and multinationals.
“India has got the second largest AI talent pool in the world, 17 million developers on GitHub, and the fastest growing developer community,” he said.
The post Future of Indian IT is Bright With New Job Roles: Microsoft’s Puneet Chandok appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.