India Warily Eyes AI

Two days after K.S. Sunil Kumar received a promotion, Human Resources phoned him up and asked him to resign. This happened in April, just as Kumar was beginning his ninth year at Tech Mahindra, one of the giants in India's IT services industry. He worked in engineering services, where he designed components and tools for aerospace firms in North America and Europe. They'd send over specs--the materials available to construct a hinge, and the kind of load it had to bear, and the cost at which it had to be manufactured--and he mocked up options with the help of software. He was a foot soldier in the army of Indian engineers to whom work is outsourced from the West, so that it can be finished at a fraction of the expense. Sometimes he left his base, Tech Mahindra's Bangalore campus, to serve stints at clients' offices abroad: in Montreal, Belfast, or Stockholm.