​On July 1 in Pune, we're hosting a conversation designed for founders building for the future of IT services in India in the age of AI. If you're this founder, you're competing with a $264B industry that knows every enterprise client by name and an AI lab that's undercutting your pitch deck.

​Join Anand Deshpande (Founder, Chairman and Managing Director, Persistent Systems), Nithin Kaimal (Partner and India COO, Bessemer Venture Partners) and Girish Shilamkar (Founder and CEO, Infracloud Technologies, acquired by Improving Inc.) to talk about the future of IT services in the AI era.

​The questions on the table: As agentic workflows proliferate, what does a services firm actually sell, and to whom? How do you build defensible IP when your clients own the data and the labs own the models? And what does the FDE model look like at 500 people versus 5, without recreating the pyramid it was supposed to replace?

​How we got here

​Three and a half years ago, ChatGPT was supposed to be the beginning of the end for Indian IT.

​Instead, the industry posted a stellar result in FY '25 - $264B in revenues, ROIC at a four-year high, market caps holding steady at over $300B. And yet, beneath the headline numbers, the ground is moving. The sentiment in the past quarter has materially shifted, with most large cap valuations dropping and questions being raised regarding the future of an industry that has seen multiple tech transformations in the past.

​Revenue per employee at the largest firms has barely shifted in a decade. Seventy percent of contracts still bill for hours, not outcomes. And the Forward-Deployed Engineer playbook that Indian IT pioneered is now being copied by the very AI labs that incumbents thought they were selling into.

​So how should founders today think about building in this brave new world?

​We would be delighted to host you for what promises to be a riveting and high energy conversation between two people at the forefront of this debate.

​Anand Deshpande, Founder of Persistent, brings the operator's view - three decades of building one of India's most respected services firms, navigating multiple cycles, and an intimate understanding of what enterprise clients actually need from a delivery partner.

​Nithin Kaimal brings the investor's view, backing the AI-native services firms that are rebuilding the model from the ground up, with platformised delivery, FDE-led teams, and outcome-based pricing.

​One sees an industry that adapts and endures. The other sees a structural reset already underway. The honest answer probably lives somewhere in between, and that's exactly the conversation we want to have.

​The event will be moderated by Girish Shilamkar.

​This isn't a debate about who wins. Taking Indian IT from $264B to a projected $400B by 2030 will need both the institutional weight of the incumbents and the technical clarity of the challengers. The interesting questions are about the path, not the destination. How do you reshape a 600,000-person pyramid without breaking the P&L? Where do T&M and outcome-based pricing actually coexist? What does India's talent advantage look like in a world where every junior task can be automated? Expect candour, genuine divergence where it exists, and a real conversation about the chapter ahead.