Sector Update | 5 June 2025
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Technology
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Productivity gains and Indian IT – What is the value at risk?
Among generative AI's many use cases, its potential to disrupt the Software Development
Life Cycle (SDLC) stands out as the most immediate and tangible. While the debate rages
on around the revenue accretive potential of GenAI, it is clear that organizations are
already seeing clearly quantifiable productivity benefits in one area: SDLC or Application
Development and Maintenance (ADM), which accounts for 35-45% of the IT service
industry's revenues.
We took a two pronged approach to estimate the time savings delivered by tools such as
GitHub Copilot. First, we did some digging into the research available so far
—
rather than
relying on anecdotal evidence, there is now concrete research that documents time
savings across various IT services tasks (as listed in the appendix on page 8). We have also
been picking the brains of industry experts (we recently invited Mr. Saurabh Gupta from
HFSResearch for a fire-side chat on the same topic). Our key findings: 1) Across various
stages of the SDLC, there is a 10-50% productivity gain from GenAI tools, 2) The upper-end
of these estimates assumes enterprise-wide scale-up of Agentic AI.
Key takeaways from the report: For most IT companies, ADM accounts for 30-40% of total
revenue. Our research suggests a ~40% productivity gain from enterprise-wide
implementation of GenAI Copilot, putting ~10-15% of IT services revenues at risk.
Key components of SDLC and the impact of GenAI on each of them
We have broken down the SDLC into six operational buckets, each representing
a different share of the total engineering effort within ADM.
Low-level coding/routine feature work (20% of ADM):
GenAI tools like Copilot
drive ~55% efficiency in repetitive coding tasks, translating to ~11% of total
ADM hours saved.
Code review & test writing (20% of ADM):
Automated suggestions and AI-
generated test cases reduce effort by ~40%, resulting in an overall time saving of
8%.
Debugging & incident response (28% of ADM):
AI-driven root cause analysis
and auto-remediation enable ~35% savings, cutting ~9.8% of the total
engineering hours.
Security fixes (15% of ADM):
Copilot Autofix reduces remediation time by ~50%,
saving ~7.5% of ADM effort.
Documentation & deployment (17% of ADM):
AI-generated documentation and
scripted release pipelines deliver ~50% blended savings, accounting for ~8% of
total hours.
This totals 44% of ADM hours that are potentially automatable in the near term.
Since ADM accounts for ~30% of total IT services revenue, the revenue at risk from
GenAI-driven productivity shifts is ~12-13%.
Abhishek Pathak - Research Analyst
(Abhishek.Pathak@MotilalOswal.com)
Research analyst: Keval Bhagat
(Keval.Bhagat@MotilalOswal.com)
|
Tushar Dhonde
(
Tushar.Dhonde@MotilalOswal.com
)
Investors are advised to refer through important disclosures made at the last page of the Research Report.
Motilal Oswal research is available on www.motilaloswal.com/Institutional-Equities, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Factset and S&P Capital.