Myra and Gia were godsend. If tourists start booking Shimla holidays to enjoy the snow and traffic outstrips the number of rooms, the duo sends alerts to hotel chains in the region to increase online inventory. They forecast demand, answer customer queries and can even update on flight delays. The duo has been at the travel portal's headquarters in Cyber City, Gurgaon, for just a year but has already moved on to solving more difficult tasks such as managing loyalty programmes. Whether cancellations or refunds from 12,000-15,000 customer interactions every day, about 60% are resolved by the duo and some of their other techsavvy mates.

India's information technology sector is facing disruption from cloud, automation and artificial intelligence, as "self-healing" codes ride over hand-written ones, bots replace humans and software engineers compete with behavioural analysts for jobs, Rostow Ravanan, CEO and managing director of Mindtree said. "Today we are rolling out products to customers with self-healing code. Once you write the code and deliver it, you don't need to maintain it, test it, as the code takes care of itself," Mr. Ravanan said in an interview. When the company makes software "I don't need to provision a new environment. Software script itself has a code that spins up an environment, runs the programme, runs analytics and the moment it finishes, it shuts down the environment."

That's the size of the workforce dedicated to a business that's thrived for the past three decades on a growth model of labour arbitrage. In the process, it's matured into a industry worth almost $150 billion. The multi-billion dollar question today is, where does it go from here, as it comes head to head with a series of challenges. Consider: New Bills being introduced by the Trump administration in the US Congress seek to make outsourcing not only tougher but more expensive. This comes at a time when protectionist sentiments that call for onsite hiring of locals are spreading globally. All this, even as traditional IT services are moving towards the digital economy.