Rajesh Nambiar remains confident as AI, Trump test India's tech sector

Lunch with BS: Meet Rajesh Nambiar, President, Nasscom

It is a busy afternoon at the Trident’s O22 restaurant in Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex. The steady clink of cutlery and the muted hum of business lunches form the backdrop as Rajesh Nambiar slides into a corner table. The choice of venue is pure convenience: Nambiar, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), which represents India’s tech industry, has a meeting with the Maharashtra chief minister. I, too, am here after an appointment in the neighbourhood. 

Our conversation takes place well before US President Donald Trump’s latest crackdown on H-1B visas and the buzz surrounding the proposed HIRE Act (Halting International Relocation of Employment). These developments will soon dominate industry chatter, but they aren’t yet weighing on Nambiar’s mind. 

He is unhurried, his manner calm as we place our order. He chooses Hibachi rice; I settle on chicken in green curry with rice.

 

I remind him that he has completed 36 years in the IT industry. In all that time, he has worked for just four companies — the role at Nasscom makes it five. “It’s been quite a journey,” he says, before tracing the arc of a career that has mirrored the rise of Indian technology itself.

 

Fresh from a master’s degree at the Indian Statistical Institute, Nambiar joined Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) through campus recruitment when the company was barely a thousand strong. “I would have been the 1,000th employee,” he laughs. Among his early colleagues was N Chandrasekaran, now chairman of Tata Sons. “We were in the same team in many ways, working very closely.”

 

TCS, he says, gave him a lot of exposure. The industry was small then; Infosys was not even around, and the Y2K moment was yet to happen. He started as a database administrator, and a few years later, TCS sent him to Boston to sell software. “I had never done anything like that ever.” By the time he left TCS, after 18 years, he was heading the East Coast operations for North America. 

He reminisces about the Y2K scare, which he calls the first big jolt that put Indian IT on the global stage. “Y2K had an expiry day. By the end of the first month of 2000, there would be no more revenue,” he recalls. “Each company had 50-60 per cent of their book of business coming from Y2K. That is when the maintenance part of the business came into focus, and since then, the industry has been a beneficiary of that momentum.” 

After nearly two decades at TCS, Nambiar felt so rooted that he assumed he would spend his entire career there. “When I look back at what I built there, and how the learning shaped me, I feel that today employees have become very transactional.” 

In 2006, Ginni Rometty — who would later become IBM’s CEO — hired him to run IBM Global Services in India. The company had just acquired the BPO firm Daksh, employing about 15,000 people. “Four years later, we had 150,000,” he says. His role in that surge was significant, helping an American multinational compete with India’s own IT giants.

 

He later moved to run Asia Pacific operations and experimented with new business models. “I was there for about 13 years. I always had long runs in organisations,” he says, a trait that seems to define his career. 

After a brief stint at networking company Ciena, the pandemic brought an unexpected call from Cognizant. Brian Humphries hired him, but leadership changes soon followed. “I had a good four years,” he says simply, declining to dwell on the churn.

Our lunch arrives, and we briefly pause to savour it. 

Between bites, we return to his career trajectory. Nambiar was by then already chair of Nasscom, responsible for finding its next president. When the search firm suggested his own name, he initially resisted. 

“Why would I leave a corporate career? But then I realised the impact one can create,” he says. In a company, the canvas is the company. “At Nasscom, it is the entire industry. Even if I’m doing a half-decent job, the multiplication factor is huge.” 

He took charge in October 2024 — a time of profound technological flux. “I don’t think the industry has seen the kind of disruption or the need to change ever more than now,” he says. 

 

So his focus is on ensuring that Indian IT services remain competitive. “Will the Indian model be threatened? It will, if we don’t do anything about it.” Hence, the need to understand the threat and provide the right guardrails. “One thing I’ve seen in this industry is resilience. Every time doubts have been raised, it has bounced back.”

 

Today, the business model is under threat with Trump’s crackdown on the H-1B visa. These visas, in a way, have been the basis of talent mobility for the industry.

 

For now, he says, companies are at a stage where it is not a worrisome issue. And while it would be good to have H-1Bs and mobility options, “if something happens, it’s not the end of the world”. He, however, acknowledges that for some of the medium-sized companies, this could be an issue as they would want the capability to move talent. “At Nasscom, we’ve always supported mobility, but not necessarily immigration.” 

In that case, is this perhaps the time for Indian players to look inwards and bag more domestic deals? Nambiar points to the $57-billion domestic industry growing faster than people realise. “But people often forget something fundamental. For all the talk of innovation, the original foundation of this industry was built on labour-cost arbitrage,” he explains. “And inside India, there is no such arbitrage. If you’re an Indian firm hiring locally, you pay roughly the same as everyone else. So price can’t be the value proposition; you have to convince local clients that you can simply do the job better.” 

Global players, he adds, often have an edge because India is a core market for them, and they are adept at “packaging” their offerings. “But increasingly, you’ll see every large Indian IT company building a domestic practice as well — because those who have a good domestic practice can now extend offerings to GCCs (global capability centres), as serving them is similar to working with a domestic company.” 

Our conversation turns to the biggest disruptor yet — artificial intelligence (AI). AI, he says, tops the agenda. “In the short run, we are overestimating the impact of AI; in the long run, we are underestimating it,” he says. “We’ve started a Talent Council to examine the impact of AI on jobs — whether tasks are getting automated, whether AI is replacing people. Once you know that, the next question is what can we do as an industry to tackle it.” 

For now, Nambiar sees two urgent tasks before him: Catalysing broad AI adoption among Indian enterprises, and reshaping the skills landscape. “The broad enterprise-level adoption is yet to happen,” he says. “Our job would be to ensure we are able to create and help the companies to truly make the transition.” Also, for all the talk on AI, there is still no good enterprise case study that talks of agentic AI implementation, he says.  

The other focus, he says, is people and talent, because “what you know today will not be sufficient five years down the line”. He is also candid about the uncertainty surrounding AI. “I’ll be honest — we don’t have all the answers yet.” 

“Do you think the industry can afford to have a skill-set gap with AI changing almost weekly?” I ask. He replies gravely: “Legacy systems are huge. To build reasoning models on top of existing systems will take time. Integration is the real challenge.”

Asked about the entry-level salaries that engineers receive — levels that have barely moved despite decades of industry growth — Nambiar calls it a market phenomenon. “We employ 5.9 million people. I agree these salary levels are not sustainable. Over time, they will go up. But remember, when these engineers join, they’re almost like interns — we have to give them a lot of training.”

 

Bridging the talent gap, he says, requires a three-way partnership: “A triage between government, industry, and academia. Often two align, and the third does not. Our role is to bring them together. That’s what we are doing with new university programmes, to ensure graduates are at least 90 per cent ready for industry.”  

The government’s apprenticeship scheme, he says, offers only a partial solution. “Many IT firms don’t take it up because of constraints. And the stipends are much lower than industry norms.” Curricula, he adds, are slow to change. “It takes five years. That’s a significant part of the problem.” 

On innovation, Nambiar’s assessment is characteristically direct. “India spends an abysmal percentage of revenue on research. We have not been core innovators,” he says. People often ask why the country hasn’t produced something like DeepSeek, the Chinese large language model (LLM). “Of course the government is supporting LLMs and we will eventually build one. But over time, LLMs will become a commodity. We are very good at leveraging core technology — building enterprise-level AI solutions will go far.” 

That ability to adapt, he believes, will matter even more as the industry navigates a prolonged spell of uncertainty. “This is probably the longest period in years where growth is muted,” he says, unruffled. “People ask when we’ll return to double digits. We are a $282-billion industry; we may reach $300 billion next year. But you have two things happening together: Rapid technological change and customer uncertainty.” Discretionary spending, he adds, is under 

pressure. “And the impact of AI is still being assessed. We have always talked about the industry’s ability to have 

non-linear growth — now you’re beginning to see it.”

 

Despite years abroad — in the US, Europe, and Singapore — Nambiar never considered emigrating. He recalls how, when his wife was expecting their second son, “she waited till the last day and then travelled back to India to deliver, before returning to the US. Somehow I always thought this is not the place where I can be.”  He looks around the restaurant as the late-lunch crowd thins. “I feel there are more opportunities in India, especially today. This level of vibrancy, I don’t think this is there anywhere  in the world.”

 

As the plates are cleared, Nambiar leans back — a leader who has witnessed the Indian IT story from its first chapter, and is now helping script the next.