Liang Wenfeng was not a well-known face, at least outside China, until January 2025. He laid the foundation for one of China’s largest hedge funds in 2015 by leveraging data analytics for trading, instead of human intervention.

By 2021, the fund managed a portfolio of over $13.8 Bn. However, in 2022, when the US brought in the CHIPS Act – effectively restricting the export of high-performance computing power to China – Wenfeng decided to make a strategic pivot. In 2023, his fund shifted its focus beyond the investment industry to concentrate its resources on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

A month later, DeepSeek was born. The company has now taken the tech world by storm, with its latest generative AI (GenAI) reasoning models being said to be as good as that of OpenAI.

This raises an important question: What’s stopping India from replicating the same success? Can Indian IT giants – consistently generating profits in thousands of crores – not allocate significant resources toward developing the much sought-after foundational generative AI (GenAI) models?

It’s worth noting that Infosys was among the first few companies globally to invest in GenAI. The company co-invested in OpenAI, alongside Elon Musk, in its early R&D phase. At the time, Vishal Sikka was at the helm of Infosys. However, he unceremoniously quit the company in 2018.

There is a general perception that the Indian IT behemoths were late in hopping on to the GenAI bandwagon and they should have built foundational models. This debate was reignited after the launch of latest models by DeepSeek and AI search engine Perplexity’s India-origin cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas publicly saying that Indian companies should focus on training their models from scratch. However, instead of building foundational models, Indian IT companies have decided to build applications on top of the existing models to ride on the GenAI boom.

With the increasing usage and new developments in the GenAI space, the ongoing Q3 earnings season saw the IT companies spell out their current and future plans for the technology. Let’s take a detailed look.

Agentic AI The Talk Of The Town

GenAI found a number of mentions in the post-earnings calls of the IT giants this quarter, and it was clear that these companies are most bullish on agentic AI.

“It’s (GenAI) getting more real. The cost of using LLMs or conversational AI models are reducing. It has dropped more than 85% since early 2023, making more use cases viable,” said C Vijayakumar, the CEO of HCL Tech.

Meanwhile, Infosys chief Salil Parekh said that the company is building over 100 GenAI agents for client applications in collaboration with its AI partner........

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