What is NASSCOM, and what role does it play in shaping India’s technology sector?
NASSCOM is the premier industry association representing India’s technology sector. Its membership spans the entire technology ecosystem, including IT services companies, Global Capability Centers (GCCs), startups, engineering and product firms, technology providers, and parts of the infrastructure landscape. In essence, almost every technology-related company in India is part of NASSCOM, making it a broad and inclusive body for the industry.
As a not-for-profit organization, NASSCOM’s primary role is to act as a bridge between the technology industry and the government. It works to create balanced, credible dialogue around policy, growth, and regulation, without representing the agenda of any individual company. Its sole objective is to ensure the overall growth of India’s technology industry, both domestically and globally. NASSCOM also operates internationally through forums in key markets such as the United States, the UK, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, reflecting the global nature of India’s technology footprint.
How is NASSCOM helping India’s technology workforce reskill and stay relevant in the era of generative AI, and what capabilities will define the next decade of AI-driven work?
India views the AI revolution as a historic opportunity to shift from being primarily a consumer of technology to becoming a global producer and creator of technology. Traditionally, India has lagged in early adoption cycles, but AI is seen as a great leveler—one that can help the country close gaps and play across the entire AI stack. This includes infrastructure, foundational models, and application-layer solutions, with a strong emphasis on building practical, solution-oriented systems that leverage large language models and reasoning frameworks.
India’s advantage lies in three key areas. First is its diversity of language, population, culture, and data, which can only be meaningfully harnessed through AI at scale. Second is the country’s expansive digital public infrastructure, including identity and payment systems, where AI integration can unlock far greater value. Third, and most importantly, is talent. With nearly 5.92 million people employed in the technology industry and the second-highest AI skills penetration globally, India has the potential to build the world’s largest AI-ready workforce through large-scale reskilling and transformation.
What would it take for India to emerge as a global compute hub, and what are the most critical factors to achieve this vision?
AI has become the core operating system of modern businesses.
It is no longer just a tool for efficiency, but the very architecture through which products are built and value is created. This shift is reshaping roles across engineering, operations, sales, and leadership—not replacing jobs, but redefining them. Over time, nearly every role will become an AI-enabled role, and every enterprise will move toward being AI-native, which creates a structural advantage for India.
Winning this transition requires blending deep domain expertise with AI fluency and systems thinking. Professionals must understand industries like banking, healthcare, and manufacturing just as deeply as they understand how to apply AI within them. NASSCOM plays a central role in steering this workforce transition by working closely with industry, government, and academia. The focus is on scaling skills, building deep-tech talent pipelines, and ensuring responsible AI-led workforce planning so that productivity gains are balanced with long-term resilience.
How is NASSCOM encouraging developer-led innovation and helping shift the industry from writing code to building high-impact deep-tech solutions?
NASSCOM approaches this transformation through three broad priorities. The first is democratizing AI skilling at scale by creating unified competency frameworks and standardized learning pathways. The goal is to expand AI literacy across job families, from advanced AI engineers to non-technical roles, ensuring that AI becomes a horizontal capability rather than a niche specialization. Key focus areas include AI-assisted coding, prompt engineering, data foundations, explainability, and AI security.
The second priority is building deep-tech-ready talent pipelines aligned with frontier sectors such as AI, space, electric vehicles, biotechnology, and semiconductors. As India’s deep-tech opportunities are only beginning to unfold, aligning skilling efforts with these sectors is critical. The third priority is guiding responsible AI-led workforce planning by helping companies and governments adopt AI in ways that balance innovation, productivity, and workforce stability, supported by playbooks, policy dialogues, and shared frameworks.
How do you envision partnerships between government, industry, and academia evolving, and what role does NASSCOM play as a bridge?
The relationship between government, academia, and industry can be seen as a three-sided structure where all parts must move in sync for India’s AI ambitions to succeed. Historically, alignment has often been partial, sometimes government and academia move together without industry readiness, and at other times industry and government align while academia lags behind. NASSCOM’s role is to ensure synchronization across all three.
This involves leveraging government missions and funding for research, ensuring academic curricula produce industry-ready graduates, and aligning industry needs with educational outcomes. Today, there is a significant gap between what graduates learn and what industry requires, often necessitating months of additional training. Reducing this gap is essential, especially as the nature of technology work shifts toward AI-enabled roles that demand different skills than traditional programming alone.
What excites you most about the coming year as we approach 2026?
One of the most exciting developments is the emergence of meaningful enterprise-level AI use cases. While foundational models have proliferated and become increasingly commoditized, real value will come from embedding AI deeply into enterprise contexts and rebuilding solutions around specific business needs. This marks a transition from experimentation to large-scale, production-grade AI adoption.
Another major area of excitement is India’s ambition to become a global compute hub. AI leadership is closely tied to compute capacity, and India is at the cusp of a once-in-a-generation infrastructure shift. While the country generates a significant share of global data, only a small portion is hosted domestically. This gap presents a major investment and growth opportunity, particularly as hyperscalers and Indian players expand data center capacity with a strong emphasis on sustainability and long-term infrastructure readiness.
Can you identify the inception point of India’s technology industry and how it evolved into a global force?
India’s technology industry began roughly 35 years ago, initially focused on serving global markets through work on large-scale systems such as mainframes. The industry’s first major inflection point came during the Y2K challenge, when Indian companies played a critical role in remediating global systems ahead of the year 2000. This period brought India firmly into the mainstream of global technology services.
What followed was a strategic evolution. Indian firms used their deep understanding of global systems gained during Y2K to transition into long-term maintenance, integration, and innovation roles. Over successive waves of technological change from client-server systems to the internet, ERP, and modern platforms, India consistently adapted and emerged stronger. Rather than being disrupted by these shifts, the industry leveraged them to build trust, scale, and resilience, laying the foundation for its current leadership position in the global technology ecosystem.
