OpenAI, Anthropic move into services, threatening IT giants
BENGALURU, INDIA — OpenAI and Anthropic are moving directly into enterprise AI services through major joint ventures with private equity firms, in a strategic pivot analysts are calling the most serious structural threat to the IT services industry since the rise of offshore outsourcing in the late 1990s.
According to a report from Business Standard, Anthropic announced a US$1.5 billion partnership with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to form an AI services company, while OpenAI is raising approximately US$4 billion from 19 investors — including TPG, Bain Capital, and Brookfield Asset Management — to launch The Deployment Company.
The dual move signals that the world’s two most influential AI firms are no longer content to license their models to integrators. They are taking direct ownership of enterprise execution — a shift that puts global IT services giants like TCS, Infosys, and HCLTech directly in their path.
A direct challenge to the IT services economic engine
OpenAI and Anthropic are no longer simply enabling software capabilities — they are moving into enterprise execution, workflow ownership, and decision orchestration.
The shift strikes at the heart of how traditional IT services firms have built their businesses: large labor pyramids monetizing implementation, maintenance, and process management.
Google Cloud has also entered the same race, partnering with Vista Equity Partners to deploy agentic AI solutions across the firm’s portfolio companies.
“That strikes at the core economic engine of traditional services firms: large labour pyramids monetising implementation, maintenance, and process management,” said Phil Fersht, founder and CEO of HfS Research.
“The first thing services firms need to stop doing is pretending AI is an efficiency overlay on the existing model. Second, they need to own enterprise trust, governance, security, and integration. And third, firms need to radically simplify their organisations,” Fersht added.
HCLTech has pegged the deflationary impact of AI companies on traditional IT services revenue at 2% to 3% annually.
Indian IT giants push back — but acknowledge the pressure
Indian IT firms have downplayed the threat, pointing to a nearly $300 billion AI services opportunity over the next four to five years in areas like AI engineering, agent orchestration, and legacy system modernization.
Infosys CEO Salil Parekh argued that complex enterprise environments still require deep contextual expertise that off-the-shelf AI cannot replicate.
“Large organisations operate with complex layers of processes, technologies, and institutional knowledge — some formal, some implicit. That contextual understanding is critical, and it is not something that off-the-shelf AI tools can easily replicate,” Parekh told Business Standard.
Coforge CEO Sudhir Singh added that future opportunities lie in building “agentic AI harnesses for clients” — monitoring models, retraining agents, and driving governance frameworks.
Still, analysts warn of a deeper risk: that OpenAI and Anthropic become the control layer for enterprise operations while IT services firms are reduced to commoditized implementation arms beneath them.
That shift would also intensify talent poaching, as AI firms hunt senior executives from services companies — a pattern Everest Group’s Yugal Joshi compared to the cloud vendor talent grab of the past decade.
The move reflects a broader recalibration unfolding across the global outsourcing industry, where the labor-arbitrage model that built today’s IT services giants is being squeezed by automation arbitrage and direct enterprise AI deployment.
Providers that evolve into governance, integration, and agentic AI orchestration partners are positioned to retain enterprise relevance, while those still selling headcount-driven implementation face mounting pressure to reinvent their business models or risk losing strategic ground to a new generation of AI-native competitors.
