15x Jump in AI References: What IT Management Commentary Reveals About India’s Tech Pivot

Few will debate that 2025 has been the year of artificial intelligence. The year saw global firms like Nvidia, Oracle, Palantir run up and how. The story was, however, a little different for India.

The Indian market, where large tech companies are essentially IT servicing firms that cater to foreign customers and rely heavily on large workforce, was lagging behind. At a time when the Nasdaq, the Wall Steet index that tracks tech companies, rallied 21% year-to date, the Nifty IT index fell -12.5%.

Fast forward to December 31, 2025 and the Indian IT sector appears to have woken up to the new AI reality. The last three months have seen Nifty IT recover and record gains of 12.5%.

The sector is witnessing a surge in AI-led acquisitions, headlined by two deals worth a combined total of $3 billion.

The most eye-catching deal saw Coforge acquiring US-based AI firm Encora for a total consideration of $2.35 billion. It was a major acquisition for a midcap IT company and a signal of intent, with the management notably stating that the combined entity will generate $2 billion in revenue by FY27.

The precursor to the Coforge deal was TCS' acquisition of Coastal Cloud, an AI-led multicloud Salesforce consulting firm, for a total consideration of $700 million, roughly amounting to Rs 6,200 crore.

HCLTech went a step further, making three strategic acquisitions to boost its AI productivity and cloud infrastructure.

Earlier this month, HCLTech, through subsidiary HCLSoftware, acquired Jaspersoft for $240 million, a deal that helped the firm strengthen its agentic and business intelligence roadmap.

The company also acquired Wooby for 4.5 million euros and HPE's Telco Solutions for $160 million, a move that will help HCLTech increase its accessibility across global telecom giants while enhancing its AI ecosystem.

It feels a bit like the moment in The Matrix when Neo finally realises there is no spoon. For India’s IT sector, the recent deals involving TCS, Coforge and HCL Tech might represent that same level of awakening — the stage where AI is no longer a clever add-on, but a new reality.

There is a subtler signal emerging from management commentary of top firms in the country. If you happen to listen to a concall of a top three IT companies, you would notice AI is no longer a passing reference. It is being woven into every discussion - be it deal wins, productivity, pricing or margins. Compared to two years ago, the tone and confidence with which AI is being mentioned has totally changed.

A deep dive done by NDTV Profit has revealed that TCS, the biggest IT firm in the country in terms of market capitalisation, had mentioned 'AI' in its concall on Oct. 2023 merely 22 times. A year later, in Oct. 2024, it was mentioned 43 times.

In the most recent earnings call on October 2025, however, the word AI was uttered as many as 87 times.

A similar pattern can be observed in Infosys, the second-largest IT company in India.

In Oct. 2023 concall, AI was mentioned only four times. A year later, that number jumped to 42. And in the latest Oct. 2025 concall, AI was mentioned 111 times - that's more than a 15x increase from two years ago.

The numbers are even more staggering for HCLTech, which talked about AI only 13 times in Oct. 2023, which jumped to 48 times in Oct. 2024.

However, in the latest Oct. 2025 concall, HCLTech management referenced AI a staggering 130 times, as they alluded to building an AI-platform revenue stream, AI being a productivity engine and how it can shape margins going forward.

Heading into 2026, Indian IT firms must find a balancing act between integrating in-house AI services and buying out foreign entities, says Ravi Menon, IT Services Analyst at Macquarie Capital.

"I do believe that enterprises this time will choose to build rather than buy because. Each company will have its own unique use of AI. That's how I think people will try to differentiate," he told NDTV Profit.

Menon further admitted that the size of the Coforge deal was rather surprising, but added that such acquisitions from a midcap company will be few and far between. However, he expects big firms like TCS to do 'programmatic M&A'.

"This is much bigger than what I think anyone expected them to do... I don't think midcap companies will acquire something so large. I would expect more sort of tuck-in acquisitions from them.

"Generally, the larger firms—I mean TCS has actually been saying that they will now do programmatic M&A—so we would expect them to be more acquisitive, but I don't think we will see such large deals from the midcap firms," he said.

Prashanth Kaddi, Partner, Deloitte India, remains optimistic Indian IT firms will sign more deals heading into 2026.

''This is apart from what they are trying to grow organically. Each of these strategies has to be a coherent set to make sense of that particular client or set of offerings. One of the natural hedges is also that many of these acquisitions have been of AI services firms globally which means they acquire the client set and the potential solutions to have AI conversations with their existing client," he said.

At the end of the day, the recent wave of AI-led acquisitions marks a clear shift in how Indian IT firms are thinking about growth.

After years - even decades - of relying on scale and labour arbitrage, the sector is beginning to reposition itself around AI.

Whether this late pivot is enough to close the gap with global peers will depend not just on deal-making, but on how effectively these firms embed AI into their core business models over the next few years.