India Inc.’s latest boilerplate: AI ate my growth but the future is bright!

It is earnings season again, that wonderful fortnight when corporate leaders use soaring prose to describe uneven performances. Last week alone offered a taste of the genre with artificial intelligence (AI) as the recurring theme. It shone bright in press releases, analyst calls, leadership speeches, and, for good measure, TV ads.

Indeed, AI is the perfect smokescreen: it smacks of the future, costs nothing to mention, and requires no proof until about 2036. With this, AI joins an honoured list of corporate lingua francas—from synergy in the nineties to disruption, followed by pivot.

Thus, it was AI that Infosys Ltd.’s CEO turned to when talking about how the IT firm’s 3.1% revenue growth in FY26 reflected “the robustness of our enterprise AI value proposition”. To make it easier for novices, he also explained that the company’s AI strategy was built around six areas, and that the “simplicity and strength” of this strategy was gaining traction. Weighed down by market headwinds, Infosys’s stock failed to gain from its Topaz Fabric strategy and is down 23% in the past six months.

Refusing to be outgunned on the linguistic track, Wipro describes itself as “a leading AI-powered technology services and consulting company” that is simultaneously “pivoting to a services-as-a-software model through AI Native Business & Platforms unit.” Sadly, full-year revenue, in this AI-first world, declined 1.6% in constant currency terms. The company’s CEO noted that geopolitical disruptions had become “the new normal”, a phrase so universally deployed that it has itself become the new normal. He confirmed that Wipro would continue making “decisive investments to navigate the AI-first world”. Read that as the investments are decisive, the revenues, less so.

Through all this, tech’s glorious global champions are busy conducting mass layoffs. Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Google, Amazon have slashed headcount while increasing AI investments exponentially. Indian IT followed suit with market leader Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. alone shrinking its workforce by nearly 20,000, while simultaneously describing its AI strategy as a source of “greater client value”. Client value clearly doesn’t refer to human beings.

The layoffs, predictably, were attributed to AI. Future growth, equally predictably, is also attributed to AI which is now the corporate equivalent of the Indian monsoon, responsible for both the flood and the drought, blamed for the bad years and credited for the good ones.

To be fair, not every IT chief needed the thesaurus. Former HCL CEO Vineet Nayyar offered a strikingly honest alternative at the India AI Impact Summit when he said that Indian IT companies would henceforth focus on “turning profits and not being job creators”. This was met with the silence that follows when someone at a glitzy wedding mentions the divorce rate.

The non-tech firms, though, are where the season of AI fruitfulness truly shines. Nestle India Ltd., which makes Maggi noodles, KitKat chocolate and Nescafe coffee, posted its highest-ever domestic sales. Not satisfied, its chairman’s statement noted that the company had “accelerated digital, tech-enabled capabilities”. The Maggi noodle has now been officially enrolled in the digital transformation journey. It is unclear which part of the two-minute cooking process will be AI-enabled, but one suspects boiling the water might be it.

JioStar, meanwhile, described its tie-up with OpenAI, which allows JioHotstar users to search for content by speaking rather than typing, as “a fundamental reimagining of the entertainment experience”. In that weighty statement, you can spy a PR agency hard at work.

The genuflection toward AI is not exclusively Indian. A recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the US, found that among 6,000 CEOs across the US, UK, Germany and Australia, the vast majority reported little to no actual impact of AI on their operations, even as hundreds of S&P 500 companies mentioned it glowingly in earnings calls. Apollo Global Management’s chief economist Torsten Slok puts it with pleasing bluntness: “AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data.”

Which brings us to those TV ads. At least two Indian universities, institutions whose most transformative technology, until recently, might have been the overhead projector, have taken to the airwaves to promote their AI programmes. One can only hope their AI lab is in better shape than the Wi-Fi.

Oh, and by the way, Company Outsider is pleased to confirm that it too is now AI-enabled, digitally transformed, and well-positioned to capture value across multiple verticals. Guidance for next week’s column remains unchanged.

In Company Outsider, Sundeep Khanna distills more than three decades of his experience writing on India Inc. into a thousand words of context and insights that few can bring to the table. Want this newsletter delivered in your inbox? Subscribe here.