In Search of India’s Next Billion-Dollar Enterprise
How corporate leaders can use AI, and India’s scale, to build their next billion-dollar business, not just cut costs.
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IDEA IN BRIEF
THE PROBLEM Most companies are using AI to cut costs. In one week of October 2026, Microsoft, Google and Meta offered exits to employees. But every rival has the same tools, so savings soon become table stakes. | THE OPPORTUNITY The models are built. The billion-dollar applications on top of them are not. India offers a billion customers, deep talent and 2,117 capability centers ready to move from cost to product ownership. | THE ANSWER Companies land as consumed, hired, outpaced or builders. Leaders should make five shifts, from cutting costs to building revenue, and lead from the front line. |
In a few weeks this autumn, the AI economy sent corporate leaders a clear message.
On October 26, Microsoft offered voluntary exit packages to about 60,000 employees, some 27 percent of its workforce, including staff in India.1 Days later, Google extended voluntary buyouts to employees in several countries, and Meta opened a voluntary departure program in France.2 On October 29, Alphabet lost close to $500 billion in market value in a single session, as investors worried about what AI is doing to search.3
Most boardrooms read these headlines as a cost story. Cut headcount, automate the back office, protect the margin. I read them as a growth story. The same technology that lets a company do yesterday’s work with fewer people lets a bold company build tomorrow’s business with far more customers.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, put the opportunity plainly to students at Stanford this autumn.
“There are many companies that can be built on top of the technology OpenAI has put out into the world that will be much bigger.”- SAM ALTMAN, CEO, OPENAI, AT STANFORD GSB, OCTOBER 20264
Over the past few weeks, I asked the same question to executives in the Evening & Weekend MBA program at Berkeley Haas, to undergraduates at UC Berkeley’s Emerging Markets club, and to Executive MBA students at IIM Udaipur: Will you be hired by the AI economy, consumed by it, or will you build it? For corporate leaders, the question is the same, asked of the whole company.
I am not an AI expert or a technologist. My view comes from the front line. From 1999 to 2008, I ran sourcing in China and visited more than 1,000 factories. I spent 18 years in Gulf retail, culminating in a role as Group CEO–Retail at Landmark Group. In India, I led The Mobile Store, then the country’s largest retail chain. Today I teach these markets at IIM Udaipur and Berkeley Haas, and I mentor CEOs.
My argument is simple. AI will reward the companies that use it to build, not only to cut. And India, with a billion customers and deep talent, is one of the best places in the world to build a billion-dollar enterprise with AI.
Cost cutting with AI is a tactic. Building with AI is a strategy.
What the front line teaches us
Big shifts are not new to those of us on the front line. China became the world’s factory. Gulf retail went global. The phone changed how India shops and pays. Each time, the noise was loud, and the signal was quiet.
The AI debate in boardrooms has plenty of noise. One view says AI is mainly a way to cut costs. Another says it is only for technology companies. A third says only Silicon Valley can win. None of these holds up. The signal is simpler. Routine work is being automated. Judgment and customer ownership are becoming more valuable. And the application layer, where AI meets the customer, is wide open.
Cost cutting is not a strategy
The cuts are real. Amazon, Meta, and Oracle have all cut thousands of jobs this year.5 In India, the top five IT firms shed a net 7,389 jobs in FY26, and entry-level tech openings fell 44 percent year on year.6 McKinsey now runs about 40,000 people alongside 20,000 AI agents.7 Exhibit 1 brings these signals together.
But a company cannot cut its way to a billion-dollar new business. Every competitor has access to the same AI tools, so the savings soon become table stakes. The lasting advantage goes to the company that uses AI to serve customers in new ways.
India’s IT leaders have understood this. TCS reports $3.1 billion of annualized AI revenue, more than 10 percent of its total.8 Cognizant’s CEO describes the shift in five words.
“From selling hours to underwriting results.”- RAVI KUMAR S, CEO, COGNIZANT8
That one line captures the whole change. When AI can do the hours, the value moves to the outcome.
Consumed, hired, outpaced, or builder
The evidence also shows why judgment matters more than ever. In a study of 758 BCG consultants, those using AI on suitable tasks completed 12.2 percent more work, 25.1 percent faster, with more than 40 percent higher quality. But on a task AI handled poorly, they were 19 percent less likely to get the right answer.9 AI is brilliant at some tasks and confidently wrong at others that look almost identical. Leaders who know which is which will make better bets. McKinsey’s head puts it well.
“There isn’t truth in AI models; there isn’t judgment.”- BOB STERNFELS, GLOBAL MANAGING PARTNER, MCKINSEY7
Put the evidence together and four places emerge where a company can land, shown in Exhibit 2. It depends on two questions. How well does it build with AI, including knowing when the AI is wrong? And does it own the customer’s problem, or sell tasks to someone who does?
Companies that sell tasks and are slow on AI get consumed: their hours and headcount are exactly what AI replaces. Companies that sell tasks but use AI well get hired: efficient vendors, in demand, but the client owns the customer and most of the value. Companies that own the customer but move slowly on AI get outpaced by faster rivals. Builders own the customer’s problem and use AI to solve it at scale.
Most companies today are moving to the right on this map. They are adopting AI to become more efficient. Far fewer are moving up, toward owning a bigger customer problem. That is where the next billion-dollar enterprise will come from.
Follow the money: where the value will be
AI creates value as a stack (Exhibit 3). At the bottom are minerals, energy and chips. Above them sit data centers, then the models, then the applications customers use. The lower layers are costly and concentrated. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang calls the top layer, applications, the place “where economic value is created.”10
Gartner expects worldwide AI spending of $2.6 trillion in 2026. More than half goes into infrastructure, and models take only about 1 percent. But AI software spending is set to grow 60 percent this year.11 The giants are laying the rails. What runs on them is still up for grabs. Harvey built AI for lawyers on other companies’ models and is now valued at about $11 billion.12 Every industry has its own Harvey waiting to be built, often by a company that already owns the customer.
Why the next billion-dollar enterprise can be built in India
My mentor Ram Charan saw this shift coming in his 2013 book, Global Tilt.13 The world has tilted, and India is on the rising side. India is already the No. 2 country for both ChatGPT and Claude by web traffic, yet only 18.5 percent of working-age Indians use AI today.14 More than 80 percent are still to come. That headroom is the market.
“India used to be a country that exported software. In the future, India will be a country that exports AI.”- JENSEN HUANG, CEO, NVIDIA, IN MUMBAI, 202415
India is also the world’s capability center. Its 2,117 global capability centers employ 2.36 million people, and more than 1,200 of them already build AI.16 In every industry, the path is the same: from cost efficiency, to specialist capability, to global product ownership. Some global companies are already moving along it. Lowe’s team in Bengaluru built the company’s “AI foundry,” which routes each query to the best-suited model, and cut supply chain simulations from weeks to about an hour.17 On October 1, 2026, Best Buy announced that its India center would move to TCS and become an AI-native capability center.18
India’s own builders show what building for Bharat looks like. Sarvam builds AI models in 22 Indian languages and is now a unicorn.19 Meesho’s AI voice agents answer about 300,000 seller calls a day.20 Reliance, Adani and Tata are building the data centers, and the IndiaAI Mission offers shared GPUs at a subsidized ₹65 an hour.21 The infrastructure is coming. The question is who will build the applications.
Learn from the world, build for India
China, India, the Gulf and Silicon Valley are the frontiers of AI. Each taught me something different.
Silicon Valley teaches the system: capital that backs bold ideas early, and a culture that treats failure as a lesson. China teaches speed: from idea to factory to market in months, not years. Today BYD outsells Tesla in electric cars, and China installed 59 percent of the world’s new industrial robots in 2025.22 23 The Gulf teaches reach: about 10 million Indians live there, a ready base of early customers, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX closed a $49 billion AI fund.24
Put it together: Silicon Valley’s imagination, China’s speed, Gulf capital, and India’s scale (Exhibit 4). For a corporate leader, this is a map for where to place each part of an AI venture.
Learn from China. Earn, hire and build in India. Set up in the Gulf. Innovate and collaborate with Silicon Valley.
The CEO’s builder agenda
How does a corporate leader turn all this into a billion-dollar enterprise? I see five shifts, set out in Exhibit 5.
From cutting costs with AI to building new revenue with AI. Keep the efficiency projects, but fund at least one AI venture aimed at a customer problem worth a billion dollars. Give it its own team, its own budget and a clear deadline.
From selling hours to selling outcomes. If AI can do the work, customers will not pay for the hours. Price on the result. That shift is hard, but it is where margins will hold.
From hosting someone else’s AI to owning the application and the customer. Partner with the model makers; you do not need to build the model. But own the customer relationship and the data that improves your service every day.
From capability center as cost center to capability center as product owner. If you run a center in India, give it a product to own, not just tickets to close. Lowe’s and Best Buy show the direction.
From hiring analysts to growing builders. Hire for judgment, reward ownership, and let teams mobilize resources beyond their budget. That is Howard Stevenson’s definition of entrepreneurship, applied inside a company.
“Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled.”- HOWARD H. STEVENSON, HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL25
Lead from the front line
None of this happens from a dashboard. I learned that the hard way in Gulf retail. As CEO, I took charge of Emax, which had lost money for ten years, and Xcite, which had lost money for four. I had no clue how to deal with such a situation. No business school had prepared me for it. We analyzed all the data and trends, and still the answers did not come. In the end, the turnaround came from listening to frontline staff, visiting stores, and understanding customers. Only then did we decide what to do. We set out to wow our most valuable customers. We renovated the stores, improved the engagement of our salespeople, improved services such as same-day delivery, and introduced installment plans. The data told us what had happened. The front line told us what to do next.
AI will give every leader more data than ever before. That makes the front line more important, not less. AI can tell you what customers did. Only listening tells you what they want next.
Build the people who build the business
A billion-dollar enterprise needs builders at every level. Rajiv Lal (HBS) and I found in our research on balanced adaptation that winning companies keep their core and adapt at the edge.26 For a company in the AI era, the core is judgment, values and customer trust. The edge is the tools, and AI will keep changing them.
So invest in the skills that move people up and to the right on the map: AI fluency and quick experiments, customer insight and product sense, and storytelling. A leader’s story wins the board, the customer and the best talent. In a world flooded with AI-generated content, that story must be convincing and compelling, but also grounded in facts and told ethically. AI can draft the words. Only a leader can stand behind them.
And rebuild the first rung. If AI now does the junior work, design new apprenticeships around customers, decisions and outcomes. A company that stops developing young talent will have no leaders in ten years.
The risks leaders must manage
None of this is automatic. Not every AI champion lasts; India saw BYJU’S scale fast and then stumble. The ILO warns that job disruption can arrive before the gains.27 The 2026 Iran war struck Gulf data centers, a reminder to build in redundancy.28 And customers and regulators will judge companies on how they use data. Trust, once lost, is the hardest asset to rebuild.
The larger market is the many. About 548 million rural Indians are now online.29 C.K. Prahalad saw this opening two decades ago.
“If we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up.”- C.K. PRAHALAD, THE FORTUNE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PYRAMID30
Done badly, AI widens gaps. Done well, it serves the many, and the many are the larger market.
Your move
I would ask every CEO to do three things. This week, name one customer problem in your industry worth a billion dollars. This quarter, give a small team the AI tools, the budget, and the authority to test a solution with real customers. This year, scale what works, or stop it and try the next idea.
Every big shift creates new champions, and this one is the biggest yet. The tools have never cost less. The market has never been larger. India’s educated youth, looking for meaningful work, and its farmers, patients, teachers and small sellers are not waiting for us. They are inviting us.
India’s next billion-dollar enterprise may be yours. Will you build it?
Yes, we can.
NOTES
1. CNBC and AFP, Microsoft voluntary exit offer to about 60,000 employees in the US, Canada, India and the UK (October 26, 2026).
2. Reuters, via 24/7 Wall St. (November 5, 2026), on Google’s voluntary buyout offers; India TV News (November 5, 2026), on Meta’s voluntary departure program in France.
3. CNBC and Yahoo Finance (October 29, 2026). Reported value lost ranges from about $475 billion to about $500 billion; Class A shares fell 12.6 percent.
4. Sam Altman, interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business (October 2026), via Fortune and Yahoo Finance (October 28, 2026).
5. Reuters (Amazon, January 2026); ABC News (Meta, April 2026); The Next Web (Oracle, from about 162,000 to 141,000 employees in the fiscal year to May 31, 2026).
6. IANS (top five IT firms, FY26); Xpheno via Outlook Business (June 1, 2026); Nomura via Business Today (August 7, 2026).
7. Bob Sternfels, interview in Harvard Business Review (January 2026), via HR Executive and Fortune (January 14, 2026); Bloomberg via Insurance Journal (December 16, 2025).
8. TCS, Q2 FY27 earnings call (October 8, 2026); Salil Parekh via PTI and The Economic Times (October 13, 2026); HCLTech, Q2 FY27 results (October 12, 2026); Ravi Kumar S and Andreea Roberts, “The $6 trillion reinvention,” Fortune (April 22, 2026).
9. Fabrizio Dell’Acqua, Ethan Mollick, Karim Lakhani et al., “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 24-013 (September 2023).
10. Jensen Huang, NVIDIA blog (March 10, 2026).
11. Gartner, Forecast: AI Spending, Worldwide (May 19, 2026). Models were $32.6 billion of $2,596 billion in 2026; AI software grows from $282.9 billion to $453.2 billion.
12. CXO Digital Pulse (March 26, 2026); NewsBytes (June 26, 2026).
13. Ram Charan, Global Tilt: Leading Your Business Through the Great Economic Power Shift (Crown Business, 2013).
14. Similarweb, share of web traffic (chatgpt.com, September 2026; Claude.ai, May 2026), China excluded; Microsoft AI Diffusion Report (Q2 2026).
15. Jensen Huang at the NVIDIA AI Summit in Mumbai, via TechCrunch (October 23, 2024).
16. Zinnov and Nasscom, India GCC Landscape Report FY2026.
17. YourStory, “How Lowe’s India GCC is driving AI innovation for global impact” (April 17, 2025).
18. TCS press release, Best Buy India capability center to become an AI-native capability center (October 1, 2026).
19. Tracxn via CXOToday (October 28, 2026).
20. Meesho, Q4 FY26 shareholder letter (May 7, 2026), via YourStory and Free Press Journal.
21. Reliance AGM and Reuters (February 2026); Adani Group (February 17, 2026); TechCrunch (February 18, 2026); Press Information Bureau, IndiaAI Mission (December 2025 to March 2026).
22. CnEVPost (January 2, 2026); DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report (December 2024), final training run only, excluding prior research; IFR, World Robotics 2025 and 2026; China National Bureau of Statistics via The Star (October 16, 2026).
23. IFR, World Robotics 2026 (September 24, 2026).
24. Ministry of External Affairs, Indians in GCC (March 2026); CNBC (July 1, 2026); Microsoft AI Diffusion Report (Q2 2026).
25. Howard H. Stevenson, Harvard Business School.
26. Srikant Gokhale and Rajiv Lal, “Balanced Adaptation,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 26-075.
27. International Labour Organization, research on generative AI and jobs.
28. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2026 Iran war; AWS and UAE Ministry of Defence statements (March and April 2026).
29. IAMAI and Kantar (January 2026); Qure.ai, FY24–25 Impact Report; Microsoft Research, Shiksha Copilot pilot; World Economic Forum, Saagu Baagu program in Telangana.
30. C.K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Wharton School Publishing, 2005).
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