New Delhi

Artificialintelligence has not made India's business process management (BPM) industry obsolete as many had feared, but is instead driving one of the sector's most significant reinventions, Nasscom President Rajesh Nambiar said on Wednesday. Speaking at the Nasscom BPM Confluence 2026 here, Nambiar said the industry now has an opportunity to become the world's "intelligent operations and transformation hub". He recalled that when generative and agentic AI emerged about two years ago, many had predicted that the BPM industry would "be history" and that companies would be completely wiped out. "But two years hence, we know that that wasn't anywhere close to the truth," he said, adding that the industry has "actually gotten better" and would improve further. Nambiar acknowledged that a significant part of the work done in the sector, including routine transactions, standard workflows and basic customer interactions, would be automated by AI agents. However, he said the question was not what AI would do to BPM, but what the industry could become because of it. Noting that Indian BPM industry's revenue was close to USD 60 billion last year, Nambiar said the more important story lay beneath the numbers. AI and analytics, cloud-based operations, domain-specific platforms and automation-led outcomes were becoming more important than call centres, where the industry originated, he said.