New Delhi, Sept. 30 -- Artificial intelligence has not made India's business process management (BPM) industry obsolete but is instead driving one of its biggest transformations, Nasscom President Rajesh Nambiar said on Wednesday.
Addressing the Nasscom BPM Confluence 2026 here, Nambiar said the industry had an opportunity to evolve into the world's "intelligent operations and transformation hub".
He recalled that when generative and agentic AI emerged about two years ago, there were predictions that the BPM industry would be wiped out. However, the sector had "actually gotten better" and would continue to evolve, he said.
Nambiar acknowledged that routine transactions, standard workflows and basic customer interactions would increasingly be automated by AI agents. But he said the focus should shift from what AI would do to BPM to what the industry could become because of AI.
India's BPM industry generated nearly USD 60 billion in revenue last year, but the more significant change was taking place beneath the headline figure, he said. AI and analytics, cloud-based operations, domain-specific platforms and automation-led outcomes were gaining importance over traditional call-centre operations.
"This industry has gone through multiple reinventions... and I believe that we are in the midst of one of the most significant reinventions of the BPM industry ever," Nambiar said.
Client discussions, he said, had shifted from whether a process could be automated to whether it could be completely redesigned using AI. As service providers increasingly take responsibility for outcomes, the boundaries between technology, operations and other functions would also become less distinct.
Nambiar said enterprise technology was earlier divided into "systems of record" and "systems of engagement", but AI agents were now creating a third category -- "systems of action".
BPM companies could emerge as the orchestration layer connecting AI agents, enterprise systems, data, domain expertise and human judgement, giving the sector a more strategic role, he said.
Nambiar said India's traditional advantages of talent, scale and cost would need to be supplemented by domain expertise, AI capabilities, innovation and trust.
Calling AI an "equaliser", he said differentiation would come from combining the technology with domain knowledge, enterprise data, process expertise and client-specific context accumulated over years.
He outlined three priorities for the sector: completely reimagining processes instead of simply identifying tasks for automation; developing hybrid operating models where humans and AI agents work together; and shifting commercial models towards outcome-based pricing rather than traditional time-and-material arrangements.
Nambiar said the AI era offered India an opportunity to redefine its role in global business operations.
"The AI era is giving us the opportunity to define what the next generation of global business operations look like," he said.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.