Indian IT companies that move from Labor Arbitrage to AI Arbitrage could win big

OpenAI and Anthropic are betting big on agentic AI.

In a scenario where agentic AI becomes mainstream, companies around the world will use AI agents for coding, finance, customer support, operations, compliance, and a lot of other work. But that also means millions or billions of tokens being spent across thousands of companies, often to solve similar problems in parallel.

That can get expensive and inefficient fast. Some companies will burn tokens because their workflows are poorly designed, their agents loop too much, or they use expensive models for tasks that cheaper models could handle.

This reminds me of how Indian IT services grew through labor arbitrage, doing software and business-process work more efficiently than clients could do in-house.

The AI version may be "AI Arbitrage". The winners won’t just be the companies using the most AI. They’ll be the ones that know how to route tasks across models, reuse workflows, cache context, validate outputs, and turn tokens into reliable business results at the lowest cost.