India, May 17 -- Let us be direct. The IT services industry built one of the most remarkable business models the world has ever seen. It scaled from hundreds to millions of people. It turned complexity into a commodity. It made the word "offshore" synonymous with efficiency, reliability, and margin.

For three decades, this worked. Then artificial intelligence (AI) arrived, not as a feature, not as a tool, but as a structural force, and everything that made this model great became its greatest liability.

The model was always elegant in its logic: hire smart people, train them fast, deploy them globally, and bill by the hour. Growth followed headcount. Margin followed utilisation. Predictability followed standardisation. The industry was ...