Indian IT services companies are emerging as indispensable partners for the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) labs, with both OpenAI and Anthropic publicly acknowledging that enterprise AI adoption now hinges less on model capability and more on deployment, integration and change management, areas the Indian IT industry has traditionally owned, according to UBS.
In a note on Indian IT services, UBS said OpenAI has flagged that demand for enterprise deployment of its coding assistant Codex is outpacing its own capacity to help clients adopt it, prompting partnerships with global systems integrators (GSIs) including Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Infosys and TCS (Tata Consultancy Services).
Anthropic has taken a similar stance, the brokerage noted, with the company's leadership stating that consulting and IT services firms are instrumental in helping enterprises move from proof-of-concept pilots to full production use of its Claude models. A successful pilot, Anthropic has said, is not the same as a system a business can actually run on, and companies that succeed with AI integration typically do so with partners who have executed such projects before.
Whi is powering AI for the enterprise? TCS, Infosys among top players.
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Infosys features on both frontier labs' partner rosters, UBS said, while TCS is named specifically among Anthropic's partners. Anthropic's broader list also includes Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, DXC, EPAM, Globant, Leidos and Slalom, among others, while OpenAI's includes Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, HCLTech and Infosys, alongside global peers such as EPAM and NTT Data.
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The brokerage said this reflects a broader theme playing out across enterprise AI conversations: clients continue to cite unclear return on investment, data readiness and governance as the biggest barriers to scaling AI deployments, rather than model performance itself. Management commentary across nearly all major Indian IT companies during the June quarter earnings season pointed to the same trend, with clients demanding measurable outcomes, governance frameworks and stronger data foundations before committing to large-scale AI rollouts.
Infosys management said during its June quarter earnings call that clients are increasingly allocating budgets toward AI, infrastructure, data readiness and cloud platforms, indicating that data preparedness, not model access, is now the gating factor for AI implementation. TCS management similarly flagged that AI governance is becoming a top priority for enterprises, with clients demanding end-to-end accountability on return on investment even as their existing technology stacks often lack readiness for AI scaling.
UBS added that AI-native startups are also increasingly viewing Indian IT services firms as partners rather than competitors. While these startups are building differentiated agentic AI platforms and vertical AI applications, they often lack the enterprise relationships, delivery scale and implementation capabilities needed to deploy their technology across large organisations, a gap Indian IT majors are well placed to fill.
The brokerage said falling token costs, the rising use of open-source and open-weight models, and growing demand for model orchestration across multiple AI systems are all expanding the addressable opportunity for IT services firms, even as pricing pressure from AI-led productivity gains remains a live concern for the sector.
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