The Economic Times World Leaders Forum: Agent economy has arrived: Can India leapfrog the platform era?

Not long ago, transformation meant thick slide decks, long timelines and consultants advising from the sidelines. They brought frameworks, not outcomes. Today, in a world shaped by generative and agentic AI, businesses are no longer looking for advisors. They’re looking for co-creators: partners whose contribution is defined not through scale of people, but through scale of intelligence and an ability to rapidly deliver tangible business value.Agentic AI makes this shift possible. These systems don’t just assist but act, learn and adapt within business workflows. They minimise manual intervention and integrate directly into enterprise environments. From onboarding and compliance to reconciliation and customer support, agents execute autonomously, continuously and intelligently. Importantly, this isn’t the end of platforms. It’s their evolution. Agentic AI thrives on strong digital infrastructure, data pipelines and system integration. Together, platforms and agents form intelligent environments where actions are automated and outcomes accelerated.

This changes the game for India.

India led the platform era, powered by deep engineering talent and global delivery scale. Now, that talent base becomes a launchpad. The agent economy rewards not just scale, but speed, accuracy and intelligence and calls for a reinvention of how technology is built, deployed and delivered.

India’s historic strength is application-level innovation. In an age of agentic AI, this is the crucial level – beyond chipset and large language model innovation – where business acceleration is unlocked and organisations can create the greatest value. It’s where agentic AI comes alive: embedded in enterprise workflows, customised for real-world processes and scaled with precision.

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With a global high-end engineering backbone rooted in India, Publicis Sapient is deploying agentic AI to transform how businesses operate. Our proprietary Bodhi platform enables rapid agent deployment, while Sapient Slingshot and CoreAI, built on Bodhi, transform enterprise software development and marketing, respectively. Our India-based teams not only write code but orchestrate complex enterprise environments to make agents effective – in use cases from autonomous onboarding solutions for financial services to agents that manage regulatory compliance for pharmaceutical companies and streamline logistics for retailers.We’ve built agent-driven platforms that cut manual reconciliation by 80%, and helped Fortune 500 firms develop AI-native capabilities that evolve in real time. Our SPEED capabilities-strategy, product, experience, engineering, and data with AI-embeds agents into enterprise architecture where they act, learn and scale.To realise India’s potential in the agent economy, three key shifts are needed.First, move from integration to orchestration. Agents can’t function in silos. To be autonomous, they must be embedded within business logic and workflows-not layered onto legacy systems. Publicis Sapient’s approach to system orchestration, rooted in domain expertise and agile delivery, shows how India-based teams can lead in building intelligent enterprises.

Second, rethink how value is measured. In the agent economy, the traditional time-and-materials model gives way to value-based engagements. Success is defined by reducing onboarding time, improving compliance accuracy, and driving faster time to value through autonomous execution.

Third, expect speed to match ambition. The era of 18-month timelines is over. AI-native delivery models allow for rapid prototyping, refinement, and deployment – in weeks, not quarters.

The rise of agentic AI isn’t just technological. It’s philosophical. It raises the question ‘what can AI agents do on their own and where do humans add the most unique value?’ This mindset shift lets us redeploy human talent toward higher-value tasks: strategy, judgment, creativity and orchestration.

India is uniquely positioned to lead this future. It has the scale, the talent and the mindset. If India commits to building the agentic layer of the enterprise, it won’t just ride the next wave – it will define it.

(Nigel Vaz is CEO of Publicis Sapient. He will be speaking at The Economic Times World Leaders Forum in New Delhi)

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