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New Delhi: Leading industry experts at the AI Impact Summit 2026 examined whether AI agents are fundamentally disrupting traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) models and cautioned against oversimplification.
Addressing speculation about the future of SaaS, Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson and CEO of Salesforce India, said that markets will make many claims, and not all of them come true. “When you talk about the SaaS model, it’s not only about coding or creating an application; it’s about understanding workflows, recognising customer pain points, and ensuring you address them. It’s about observability, governance, auditability, and adoption,” she said during a session here.
Bhattacharya emphasised that while ways of working will evolve, long-term sustainability will depend on delivering real customer value. K. Krithivasan, CEO of Tata Consultancy Services, said, “We are entering an era where the role of the software engineer is shifting toward high-level architecture and rigorous validation.”
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While AI promises immense productivity gains, he stressed that enterprise adoption requires significant groundwork, from data rationalisation to application modernisation. “We don’t envision a shrinking of the sector, but rather a massive explosion in the volume of what can be produced and the complexity of the problems we can solve,” he added.
Salil Parekh, Chief Executive Officer of Infosys, said that AI is creating a $300 billion services opportunity by making the ‘impossible’ economically viable. Through Infosys’ orchestration platforms, he noted, enterprises can integrate foundation models with specialised agents to unlock measurable business value.
According to C. Vijayakumar, CEO and Managing Director of HCL Technologies, “Large language models and foundational models cannot yet be applied most efficiently to enterprise use cases,” noting a persistent gap between foundational capabilities and enterprise-grade performance.
The leaders delivered a clear message that AI agents will reshape business and operating models, but they will not render them obsolete overnight. Success in the AI era will hinge on agility, enterprise readiness, orchestration, and, above all, the ability to continuously solve real customer problems in increasingly complex digital ecosystems, they noted.
