Coforge CEO and executive director Sudhir Singh said IT services companies have the opportunity to bridge the gap between artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and operationalising it within enterprises, calling it the single biggest opportunity for the industry, at an analyst event on Thursday. He said the industry is at an inflection point, with world-class AI now downloadable and approaching zero costs as models become utility, creating an AI deflationary squeeze in tech services as software, knowledge work and effort-based services become cheap. Revenue from long-standing businesses is under strain as AI improves productivity, requiring fewer people for the same work, and clients are asking for benefits to be passed on, so deals signed for a certain value are negotiated at a significant discount during renewal. AI revenue remains a small portion of the overall pie, and regular AI-led deals are hard to come by as clients hold back amid macroeconomic challenges and a volatile geopolitical environment. For Coforge, 6-7 per cent of its topline in the first quarter was outcome-based. The industry has pegged AI services to be a $300-400 billion new opportunity by 2030 across data for AI, legacy modernisation, agentic workflows, AI operations, cybersecurity and AI governance. Singh said Coforge’s AI strategy rests on four pillars: creating the right enterprise context, pushing enterprises to scale AI projects in real-world environments, changing the commercial model to outcome-based from effort-based, and having industrial autonomy.