India’s Services Model is Splitting. Which Side are You Building For?

India’s Services Model is Splitting. Which Side are You Building For?

AI is not eliminating India’s technology services industry—it is bifurcating it. The roles that absorb millions of annual hires are contracting. The roles that govern, challenge, and take accountability are growing in number. Organizations that fail to distinguish between these two trajectories will find the market has repositioned them.

India’s technology services industry was built on a proposition that held for three decades: recruit graduates at scale, train them in structured processes, and deliver that execution capacity to the world at a margin no Western competitor could match. The proposition worked. It built a sector that employs close to 8 million people, generates hundreds of billions in export revenue, and establishes India as the world’s back-office for enterprise technology.

That proposition is now being disaggregated by the same technology India helped build. But the disruption is not what the displacement narrative suggests. AI is not collapsing the sector. It is splitting it into two distinct, diverging trajectories that will determine which organizations lead India’s services economy into the next decade and which are left optimizing a model the market has moved past.

Srinivas Reddy, Senior Vice-President and Head of EPAM India, describes the specific hiring profile his organization is actively building: AI architects, full-stack agentic engineers, AI governance and verification leads, data and platform engineers focused on AI readiness, and product-minded engineers who shape client outcomes rather than code features. A full-stack agentic engineer—someone who can design specifications, orchestrate AI agents, integrate enterprise systems, and apply domain context across all of it—does not exist at scale in the current market.

EPAM India’s response is instructive: “This is not a talent acquisition strategy,” Reddy says. “It is a talent manufacturing strategy.” Internal academies, structured upskilling, selective hiring, and platform partnerships are the mechanisms, because the market cannot yet supply what the next phase of services delivery requires.

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