With the proliferation and adoption of GenAI, the enterprise selling is taking a different hue. The increased uncertainty due to MFI loan distress in India, along with geopolitical challenges and tariff issues, is adding fuel to the fire. Enterprises are more and more either slashing the budgets for new initiatives or green lighting only the initiatives that result in cost savings or significant value addition.

This has created unique challenges in the business of Enterprise IT. While every new initiative and the costs associated with it are being scrutinized thoroughly in the face of tighter budgets and a soft business environment, even the BAU projects are being re-looked at. And this is coming at a time when most of the OEMs too are looking to pass on their inflated costs to customers. This is resulting in a situation where the customers are constantly on the lookout for price reductions from the previous years and the OEMs are on the other hand looking to increase the prices.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, as customers are still opening their wallets to companies which are either bringing something new and better to the table, or are promising to deliver better ROI by leveraging AI capabilities. However, with GenAI too becoming a much talked-about event, the focus is now shifting from just PoCs to actual products and processes that can deliver measurable results. While there is still some ground to cover on building processes and systems that leverage GenAI for rather large use cases, there are a lot of smaller and effort-saving GenAI tools that are being adopted by enterprises and are delivering good value.

Whether the current change in current will result again in consolidation of wallet share to the deep-pocketed and larger OEMs or if the nimble and new-age solutions providers, buttressed by their AI-first approach and capabilities, will post a stiff challenge to these entrenched behemoths is something only time will tell, but GenAI has to some extent surely leveled the playing field.