New Delhi, June 3 -- India's information technology (IT) services companies are facing a shift in client expectations as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes business models.

From the world's largest banks to retail majors, customers now increasingly prefer engineers who combine AI expertise with sales and consulting skills to drive end-to-end deployment of the new technology, even as this shift raises costs for the country's largest tech services firms.

Homegrown IT services companies have traditionally worked with a simple business model. Under this, a third of their engineers were typically stationed in client locations such as in the US and Europe and commanded higher pay packages, whereas the remainder functioned remotely from che...