Nasscom: AI is reinventing India’s $60Bn BPM industry, not ending it
- India’s BPM industry earned close to $60 billion last year, Nasscom says.
- Nasscom President Rajesh Nambiar says AI is driving the sector’s biggest reinvention.
- Routine transactions and basic customer interactions will be automated by AI agents.
- Nasscom wants outcome-based pricing instead of time-and-material models.
NEW DELHI, INDIA — Artificial intelligence (AI) has not made India’s business process management (BPM) industry obsolete, as many had feared, but is driving one of its biggest reinventions, Nasscom President Rajesh Nambiar said.
The industry, with revenue close to $60 billion last year, now has a chance to become the world’s “intelligent operations and transformation hub,” he said.
Better, not history
Nambiar spoke at the Nasscom BPM Confluence 2026 on Sept. 30, Rediff reported.
He recalled that when generative and agentic AI emerged about two years ago, many predicted the BPM industry would “be history.”
“But two years hence, we know that that wasn’t anywhere close to the truth,” he said, adding that the industry has “actually gotten better.”
Nambiar acknowledged that much of the sector’s routine transactions, standard workflows and basic customer interactions would be automated by AI agents.
Client conversations have moved from whether a process can be automated to whether it can be completely redesigned using AI, he said.
Humans and agents together
Nambiar said BPM companies can become the orchestration layer for emerging “systems of action” driven by AI agents, bringing together enterprise systems, data, domain expertise and human judgment.
India’s advantages of talent, scale and cost will need to be supplemented by domain expertise, AI capabilities, innovation and trust, he said.
He described AI as an “equaliser” that is becoming increasingly accessible to all companies, so differentiation will come from combining it with domain knowledge, enterprise data, process expertise and client context.
“That’s why we also call AI a very intelligent stranger who is sitting next to you,” he said, noting that such systems lack the context the industry has built.
He outlined three priorities: reimagining processes entirely, building hybrid operating models in which humans and AI agents work together, and redefining what Indian BPM represents to the world.
“This would be accompanied by commercial models based on outcomes rather than traditional time-and-material pricing,” he said.
“The last two decades established India as one of the world’s greatest BPM destinations,” Nambiar said.
For workers, the shift points to fewer routine transaction roles and more demand for staff who can supervise AI agents and redesign processes.
For buyers, Indian providers are likely to pitch outcome-based pricing and agentic AI built into delivery, which changes how contracts measure value.
Companies comparing partners can review the top AI outsourcing companies and ask which still bill by the hour.
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Disclosure: Outsource Accelerator uses AI tools in the backend of its editorial workflow. Every article is reviewed and verified by a human editor before publication.
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