HCL CEO Warns Industry Faces Painful Transition

HCL Technologies Managing Director and CEO C Vijayakumar said on Feb 24 at Nasscom's NTLF in Mumbai that the AI-driven transition for India's nearly $300 billion IT services sector will be 'painful' because it involves people, but dismissed investor fears as overblown. He urged reskilling to boost efficiency up to fourfold, highlighted opportunities from mainframe modernization and COBOL conversion, warned SaaS pricing pressures, and noted Anthropic's Claude will excel at coding though coding is only about 30% of development.