New Delhi, Feb 16 (IANS) Indian IT companies will remain focused on profits rather than employment, as AI threatens to disrupt industries across the spectrum, former HCL Technologies CEO Vineet Nayyar said here on Monday while speaking at the ‘AI Impact Summit 2026’.

Speaking at a session on the opening day of the AI Summit, Nayyar said that from an employment point of view, “I think it is very important for us to understand that Indian companies, including Indian IT companies, are going to be profit-driven”.

He further stated that “if you believe that they are going to create employment, you must be dreaming. Therefore, the question is how do we create employment in this environment, and that employment comes from mass scale startups, which is what this government has already doing”.

In AI competitiveness, India ranks third globally, behind the US and China.

Meanwhile, Mustafa Suleyman, Chief of artificial intelligence at Microsoft, warned recently that most white‑collar roles that rely on computers could be automated within the next 12 to 18 months. He said that the company is building a “professional‑grade AGI”, that could automate majority of works done by lawyers, accountants, project managers and marketers.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Suleyman said Microsoft is racing to develop “professional‑grade AGI”, AI systems capable of performing nearly everything a human professional can do. He said the current shift in AI landscape would go beyond incremental productivity gains to produce structural displacement across knowledge‑based professions.

“White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person, most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months,” the report quoted Suleyman as saying.

US tech giant Oracle plans to cut 20,000 to 30,000 jobs to expand its AI data‑centre capacity, while Amazon recently announced lay off 16,000 employees as part of its AI restructure plan.

Notably, software stocks globally, including Indian IT stocks, have been hammered as US AI firm Anthropic expanded its enterprise AI assistant with a new automation layer designed to handle complete business workflows.

Investors’ caution of AI replacing significant portions of the software business resulted in a massive sell-off now known as the “SaaSpocalypse.”

The new AI assistant could automate legal document reviews, compliance checks, sales planning, marketing campaign analysis, financial reconciliation, data visualisation, SQL‑based reporting and enterprise‑wide document search.

—IANS

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