Bengaluru’s IT giants must wake up to the AI storm or risk obsolescence

I first visited Bengaluru in the 1990s, when its airport was a modest structure with a single civilian runway and the roads were seemingly empty. The city felt like a frontier outpost. Its IT leaders were hungry and ambitious, willing to jump on any opportunity presented to them. They believed they could change the world—and they did.Fast forward three decades. The airport is now a gleaming global hub, the traffic is legendary, and Bengaluru has become synonymous with IT. But when I meet the same leaders who once built this powerhouse, I hear nostalgia rather than vision. They reminisce about their past triumphs, but when I propose radical projects that could save lives and reduce suffering, I get only excuses for why they cannot — or will not — do more.Look up at the Bengaluru sky and you can literally see the dark clouds of change on the horizon. Artificial intelligence is reshaping industries at a pace even Silicon Valley finds dizzying. Yet the IT veterans act as if these clouds will pass, just as previous storms have. At a recent Infosys Instep celebration, Nandan Nilekani, Narayana Murthy, and Salil Parekh chuckled that obituaries have been written for the IT industry before, and it has always survived. True—but this time the threat is existential.In my book From Incremental to Exponential, I explained why the complacency of incumbents almost always ends in disaster. Once-dominant Fortune 500 companies become “toast”—roadkill on the highway of technological change—because they mistake momentum for immortality. Think of Kodak, which invented the digital camera but died protecting its film business. Or Nokia, once the king of mobile phones, blindsided by Apple. Or Blockbuster, laughing at Netflix until it became a case study in arrogance. Everything looks fine until it suddenly isn’t.The Indian IT industry now risks joining this hall of toast. Code maintenance, bug fixes, integration, testing, documentation — this was the bread and butter that made the global giants. But these very functions are now being swallowed by AI systems. Large language models can generate, debug, and document code in seconds. Agentic systems can modernize legacy platforms without human armies. Reskilling a few thousand employees won’t fix this. You cannot retrain your way out of structural obsolescence when the machines are absorbing the work itself.This is why I keep urging Bengaluru’s leaders to look beyond their comfort zones. The threat of AI is not simply that margins will be squeezed or contracts lost. The bigger danger is that Indian IT companies will wake up to find their market capitalizations cut in half as clients abandon outdated models. Trump’s saber-rattling about tariffs on outsourcing may cost India a few billion dollars in lost contracts, but AI could erase tens of billions more by demolishing the very foundation of the services model.However, with every threat comes opportunity. Exponential technologies always destroy before they create. The same AI tools that endanger services also open doors to new domains. Indian IT firms could build operating systems for autonomous transport, digital twins for power grids and cities, AI-driven supply chains that anticipate shocks, and mission software for space-tech and synthetic biology. These are trillion-dollar markets waiting to be claimed—if the industry can shake off its complacency.Let me give one more example. Together with IIT Madras and AIIMS, I proposed building a city-wide water and sewage intelligence network across Bengaluru with real-time dashboards for citizens and utilities, and AI models to predict contamination and health outbreaks—powered by breakthrough spectral analysis from Vionix. This would save lives, generate goodwill, and create a billion-dollar market for subscription-based environmental intelligence. Yet the IT leaders I approached would not even consider it, too anchored in the past. That is fine—this is only one of hundreds of opportunities. But at some point, the industry must wake up to the reality that its survival depends on building such platforms.The good news is that there is also new Bengaluru rising—a generation of entrepreneurs who remind me of the city’s pioneers in the 1990s. Hungry, fearless, and ambitious.Nithin Kamath, with Zerodha, has turned stock trading into a mass-market platform while building one of the world’s most profitable fintech firms. Bhavish Aggarwal is reinventing mobility—at Ola Electric he’s building India’s most advanced EV ecosystem and, through Krutrim AI, staking a claim to be India’s answer to OpenAI. Naveen Tewari has steered InMobi through brutal cycles and is now doubling down on AI with Glance, aiming for a bold IPO and global consumer reach. And Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is taking Biocon beyond biosimilars into AI-driven drug discovery and tackling global health challenges like diabesity.These are the kinds of leaders who can carry Bengaluru into its next reinvention. Silicon Valley has burned down and rebuilt itself multiple times—through the mainframe era, the PC boom, the dot-com bust, social media, cloud computing, and now AI. Bengaluru, too, must embrace this cycle of creative destruction.The city has already shown the world what is possible when ambition meets opportunity. If its leaders stop clinging to nostalgia and harness the power of exponential technologies, Bengaluru can once again redefine the future—and this time on a truly global stage. For the IT giants, the choice is stark: either lead this reinvention, or risk being left behind in their own hall of toast.Vivek Wadhwa is CEO, Vionix Biosciences. The views expressed are personal.

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Bengaluru’s IT giants must wake up to the AI storm or risk obsolescence

Code maintenance, bug fixes, integration, testing, documentation — this was what made the global giants. But these functions are being swallowed by AI systems

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Bengaluru’s IT giants must wake up to the AI storm or risk obsolescence

Code maintenance, bug fixes, integration, testing, documentation — this was what made the global giants. But these functions are being swallowed by AI systems