Nandan Nilekani addressed the audience at Infosys’ Investor AI Day 2026, held in Bengaluru yesterday, leaving both attendees and online viewers with plenty of food for thought. Not just that, as per reports, owing to his address and the positives of AI mentioned in the talk, the IT index rose by 3 percent on Tuesday, with Infosys shares gaining more than 4 percent, while other heavyweights like HCL Tech, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, and TCS gained up to 3 percent.
At the event, Anthropic and Infosys announced a partnership to deliver enterprise AI solutions across telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing, and software development. The collaboration combines Anthropic’s Claude models and Claude Code with Infosys Topaz, an AI-first suite of generative and agentic AI services and platforms, to help organizations accelerate software development and adopt AI with the governance and transparency required in regulated industries.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also praised Infosys’ expertise in bridging the gap between an AI model that works in a demo and one that works in a regulated industry, which could also be the reason for the sudden gains in the company’s shares.
However, today, as of 13:45, the Nifty IT Index was down by 1.81 percent.
Only a couple of weeks ago, the Indian IT index saw another big fluctuation when IT stocks took a nosedive after AI company Anthropic announced its new AI tool, Claude. On February 3 and 4, the Nifty IT index posted its sharpest decline since the pandemic years, with leading firms such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCLTech, LTIMindtree, and Coforge registering significant single-day losses. In total, close to Rs2 lakh crore in market value was erased, reflecting investor concerns about how agentic automation may influence demand for outsourcing and enterprise software services.
The launch of Claude Cowork last month and the subsequent expansion of its capabilities over the last few weeks led to fears among Indian IT companies about losing their edge. The new tools in Claude are reportedly capable of automating tasks across legal, sales, marketing, and data analysis—including reviewing contracts, drafting legal briefings, and building financial models. While the efficacy of these tools is unclear, investors fear Anthropic's tools could perform this work at a fraction of the cost of IT service firms and impact their margins.
These fluctuations suggest that developments in AI trigger swift reactions from markets and industry across the world. And lately, the world of AI has been marked by rapid change and development. It is important to note that the transitions AI is bringing about are very different from those of past technological advancements.
Nilekani’s address at Infosys captures this trend by emphasising the changing yet constant nature of technology. From the printing press to the adoption and dissemination of AI and its tools, technology has transitioned and come a long way. While the change was slow to begin with, in the last 60–70 years, it has become much faster-paced. Due to the constant and ever-changing nature of technological progress, companies have always strived first to adopt change and then to leverage it for their own and their customers’ benefit. With the infusion of AI into our lives, the transition has been much faster than earlier ones. It took the internet more than 10 years to reach a billion users, smartphones five years to do so, and AI achieved that in only a couple of years. However, it is important to note that the speed of AI is owing to the fact that the internet and smartphones have already become ubiquitous. “The speed of AI is also because of the infrastructure of the previous era,” says Nilekani.
While all the past transitions led to significant changes, as per Nilekani, with AI, the transition is “much more fundamental.” How so? He believes that the transition has a business dimension. With AI, “we cannot run business the old way, and businesses have to change. The customer journeys have to change. It's a huge challenge for talent. Talent will have to deal with a world where writing code will not be the goal. It'll actually be making an AI work,” says Nilekani.
Earlier, the change was not so fundamental because technology was always deterministic, as per Nilekani. “You said A+B = C. So, no matter how many times you said A+B, the answer was C. In this AI world, every time you give a prompt, you'll probably get a different answer. And therefore, how do you deal with this non-deterministic world? But how do you make sure what you build has the robustness, reliability, and resilience of the deterministic world? That's what the challenge is for everybody.”
According to him, this is a fundamental, root-and-branch surgery of the way business is done, which is why this technology transition is so dramatically different from anything else that we have seen.
Emphasising the modernisation of technology, Nilekani referred to AI as “good news” and said that, because of it, we now have the tools to modernise quickly and more economically.
First Published: Feb 18, 2026, 15:18
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