Large enterprises have to unravel business processes to make it AI-first: Virtusa COO at The Hindu Technology summit

Large enterprises have to unravel business processes to make them AI-first and need to rewire business processes in terms of AI ready, said Virtusa COO Venkatesan Vijayaraghavan on Friday (February 13, 2026).

In a conversation with The Hindu Tech Editor John Xavier on “Managing the post-Anthropic Plug-in Era”, Mr. Vijayaraghavan said, “I am assuring you all. We are definitely not in the coffin; we will surface back with much more to do. We will go into the box, but we will come out of the box because many more boxes are going to open,” he said.

Also Read: The Hindu Tech Summit 2026 LIVE

Pointing to small and medium businesses, Mr. Vijayaraghavan said, “they will start new products with new models and existing ones they may throw away.”

Speaking about a transition towards 20% humans and 80% agents, Mr. Vijayaraghavan said, “50% of the deals Virtusa participates in, we are talking about an agent-first approach in every field.”

Pointing to the need for being super strong on the underlying principles of core engineering, Mr. Vijayaraghavan said, “We are getting certain initial success in that segment. But we need to transition this into our universities. I can do coding today in Java, tomorrow in Python, the day after in something else, but today my problem is that people come and ask for those skills in a human. Without AI first I am struggling. It almost feels like walking to Starbucks and asking for a hot ice cream.”

To a question on the recent release of Anthropic plugins and their impact, Mr. Vijayaraghavan said, “I am sure many people have been having sleepless nights over the last week as materials keep coming at a speed we cannot catch up. We are now purely focused on which services we can cannibalise, and which services will go on with an AI-first approach. And our portfolio companies offer us a very good push. A good variety of our portfolio companies, who are innovative, who are doing products, and we are learning a lot from them,” he said.