Artificial intelligence has not made India's business process management (BPM) industry obsolete as many had feared, but is instead driving one of the sector's most significant reinventions, Nasscom President Rajesh Nambiar said on Wednesday.
Speaking at the Nasscom BPM Confluence 2026 here, Nambiar said the industry now has an opportunity to become the world's "intelligent operations and transformation hub".
He recalled that when generative and agentic AI emerged about two years ago, many had predicted that the BPM industry would "be history" and that companies would be completely wiped out.
"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" and would improve further.
Nambiar acknowledged that a significant part of the work done in the sector, including routine transactions, standard workflows and basic customer interactions, would be automated by AI agents.
However, he said the question was not what AI would do to BPM, but what the industry could become because of it.
Noting that Indian BPM industry's revenue was close to USD 60 billion last year, Nambiar said the more important story lay beneath the numbers.
AI and analytics, cloud-based operations, domain-specific platforms and automation-led outcomes were becoming more important than call centres, where the industry originated, he said.
"This industry has gone through multiple reinventions, as you can see from the early days. And I believe that we are in the midst of one of the most significant reinventions of the BPM industry ever."
He said client conversations have moved from whether a process could be automated to whether it could be completely redesigned using AI.
As service providers take responsibility for outcomes, the lines between technology, operations and other functions would blur, leading to more integrated offerings, he said.
Explaining the shift, Nambiar said enterprise technology was earlier divided into "systems of record" and "systems of engagement". He said a third category, "systems of action", is now emerging, driven by AI agents.
BPM companies have an opportunity to become the orchestration layer for these systems. That role would bring together AI agents, enterprise systems, data, domain expertise and human judgement, and give the industry a more strategic role than before, he said.
On competitiveness, Nambiar said India's traditional advantages of talent, scale and cost would need to be supplemented by domain expertise, AI capabilities, innovation and trust.
He described AI as an "equaliser" that is becoming increasingly accessible to all companies. He said differentiation would come from combining AI with domain knowledge, enterprise data, process expertise and context built over years of work with clients.
"That's why we also call AI a very intelligent stranger who is sitting next to you," he said, noting that such systems lacked the context that the industry had built.
Nambiar outlined three priorities for the industry. The first being reimagining processes entirely rather than merely asking which parts to automate with AI.
The second, he said, is building hybrid operating models in which humans and AI agents work together. "This would be accompanied by commercial models based on outcomes rather than traditional time-and-material pricing."
The third is reinventing what Indian BPM represents to the world.
"The last two decades established India as one of the world's greatest BPM destinations... But the AI era is giving us the opportunity to define what the next generation of global business operations look like," he said.