Wipro 3.0: The Transformation Wipro Now Needs

I. The Market Has Delivered a Warning

Wipro Ltd is scheduled to leave the Nifty 50 on 30 September 2026 and BSE Ltd is scheduled to take its place. The mechanics are straightforward: the index is periodically rebalanced according to its methodology, and BSE's six-month average free-float market capitalisation of ₹1.41 lakh crore is now at least 1.5 times that of Wipro, whose corresponding figure is ₹55,930 crore. Wipro will move to the Nifty Next 50. 

An index reshuffle is, of course, a mechanical exercise, and should not by itself be interpreted as a judgement on the quality of a business. But sometimes a mechanical event acquires meaning from the circumstances surrounding it.

Wipro's impending exit comes after a difficult period for its core IT-services business. In the quarter ended June 2026, consolidated revenue rose 10.6 per cent year-on-year to ₹24,479 crore, but IT-services revenue increased only 0.9 per cent in constant-currency terms and declined 1.2 per cent sequentially. IT-services operating margin fell to 16 per cent, from 17.3 per cent in the preceding quarter, while net income rose just 0.6 per cent year-on-year to ₹3,352 crore.

There are positive signals: large-deal bookings rose 12.9 per cent sequentially in constant-currency terms to $1.63 billion, including 13 large deals. But bookings are commitments whose revenue is realised over time; they have not yet translated into a meaningful acceleration in the top line. Wipro's guidance for the September quarter is itself revealing: IT-services revenue is expected to decline by as much as 1.5 per cent or grow by no more than 0.5 per cent sequentially in constant-currency terms.

In other words, this is not a story of a company suddenly losing its ability to win large contracts. It is a story of a very large technology-services company struggling to convert its scale, relationships, and deal flow into sustained growth. That distinction will matter enormously as the technology industry changes.

The market's signal therefore needs to be read alongside the larger transformation underway. The Nifty 50 has historically represented India's most valuable and consequential listed businesses. Wipro's impending departure, after more than two decades in the benchmark, comes at a time when investors are questioning the growth prospects of traditional outsourceeing businesses and when India's economic growth is becoming more diversified. Economic Times noted that Wipro's shares were down about 31 per cent in 2026 at the time of the index announcement, while the combined weight of India's largest IT companies in the Nifty 50 had fallen substantially from its earlier peak.

None of these, individually, constitutes a corporate crisis. Wipro remains a large, profitable company with substantial enterprise relationships, strong cash generation, and significant large-deal activity. The more consequential question is whether its existing business model is becoming a constraint on its next phase of growth.

That question has become urgent because the technological environment that supported Wipro's second great transformation is changing rapidly. Artificial intelligence is beginning to automate portions of the execution work on which traditional IT services have depended. At the same time, technology companies themselves are moving closer to enterprise deployment, multinational corporations are bringing more technology capabilities in-house through Global Capability Centres, and consultancies are moving deeper into technology implementation.

Wipro therefore faces something more consequential than a weak quarter or an index exit. It faces a strategic inflection point.

And that is why its history matters. Wipro has transformed itself before. The question today is whether it can summon that same spirit of reinvention again.

It may be time for Wipro 3.0.

II. Wipro 1.0 to Wipro 2.0: The Great Transformation

Wipro was founded by Hashim Premji in December 1945, in Amalner, Maharashtra as Western India Vegetable Products Ltd - for producing & selling vegetable ghee and refined cooking oils. For its first couple of decades, it was essentially a consumer-products company.

When Hashim Premji died in 1966, his 21-year-old son, Azim Premji, took over. He did not immediately abandon the inherited business. In the 1970s, Wipro diversified into other consumer products and industrial businesses, while Azim Premji developed the ambition and capabilities that would eventually take the company far beyond its origins.

The decisive break came at around 1980.

Wipro entered the emerging information-technology industry, establishing capabilities in Bangalore and moving into computer hardware. It developed minicomputers with technological collaboration and began building the engineering and software capabilities that would eventually underpin its global technology business. Wipro's own corporate history describes its expansion into IT during the late 1970s and early 1980s; the company's technology initiative was also closely associated with the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

The timing was remarkable. India's computing industry was still young, and IBM had exited the country after the regulatory changes of the late 1970s. Wipro was therefore not simply entering an established, high-growth industry. It was making a long-horizon bet on an emerging technological future.

That bet deepened during the 1980s. Wipro developed software capabilities alongside hardware, and its technology businesses gradually evolved from domestic computing into software development, engineering and, eventually, global IT services. By the 1990s and 2000s, IT services had become the company's principal growth engine and transformed Wipro into one of India's leading global technology companies.

The transformation was finally reflected in the company's structure in 2013, when Wipro separated its non-IT businesses into Wipro Enterprises. The listed Wipro Ltd was thereby left as a focused IT company, while the consumer products and industrial components businesses continued separately.

That history matters because Wipro's defining achievement was not simply becoming successful at IT services. It was having the courage to challenge what Wipro already was.

Hashim Premji had built a consumer-products company. Azim Premji eventually made a very different bet: that Wipro's future lay in technology. It took more than three decades for that bet to mature fully into the corporate identity represented by the 2013 demerger from its consumer businesses. 

The question facing Wipro today is therefore not unprecedented.

It is, in a sense, a historical question being asked again:

Can Wipro once more change what Wipro is?

III. From Wipro 2.0 to the Great Squander

Wipro's transformation into a technology company was not completed merely by entering IT in 1980. It took decades of capability-building, international expansion, acquisitions and organisational change before the company formally separated its non-IT businesses in 2013. By then, IT services had become the centre of gravity of Wipro's identity.

That success, however, contained the seed of a new problem.

Wipro became exceptionally good at helping other companies adopt and operate technology. Its accumulated knowledge of banking, manufacturing, telecom, healthcare, energy and other industries was enormous. Its engineers worked inside some of the world's largest enterprises, navigating their legacy systems, workflows, regulatory requirements and technological problems.

Yet the company did not systematically turn enough of that accumulated knowledge into technological assets that belonged to Wipro itself.

This was the argument I made in my article "Wipro's Great Squander" in September last year: Wipro had repeatedly demonstrated the ability to build technology, but its most successful business model increasingly became the destination rather than the platform for further technological reinvention.

The distinction matters. The problem was never that Wipro chose IT services. That decision was itself one of the company's great strategic successes. The problem was allowing the services model to become so dominant that the company's enormous reservoir of engineering knowledge, client experience and product-building capability was not converted sufficiently into globally scalable software, platforms and proprietary intellectual property.

There were, and remain, signs of movement in that direction. Wipro has invested in proprietary platforms, acquisitions, consulting, cloud, cybersecurity, engineering and AI; its own corporate reporting has for years described a portfolio that includes proprietary products and platforms alongside partnerships and services. But these initiatives have not yet produced a transformation comparable to the one that made IT services the company's defining business.

That is the squander.

A services engagement can solve a client's problem today and generate substantial revenue. But if the same problem appears repeatedly across hundreds of enterprises, something more valuable may be possible. The experience can be abstracted into a framework; the framework into software; the software into a platform; and the platform into intellectual property that can be deployed repeatedly without recreating the original project from scratch.

The strategic progression is therefore:

Client problem → implementation experience → recurring pattern → framework → platform → proprietary asset.

Wipro has had forty years of opportunities to travel along that path. The question is why it has not travelled far enough.

This is particularly significant now because the economic foundation of IT services is changing. Wipro's own recent strategy has already recognised the importance of AI, consulting and technology-led solutions, including the incorporation of agentic AI into traditional engagements. But adding AI to the existing services model is not necessarily the same as transforming the model itself.

The challenge, therefore, is no longer simply to make Wipro's existing business more efficient with AI.

It is to ask the question Azim Premji asked in another technological era:

What should Wipro become now?

IV. The New Strategic Squeeze

The pressure on Wipro is not coming from AI agents alone. Several forces are converging on the traditional position occupied by large IT-services companies.

First, agentic AI is compressing execution. Coding, testing, support, ticket resolution and other standardised tasks can increasingly be performed by AI systems, weakening the labour-arbitrage model in which revenue has historically tracked the number of engineers deployed. The emerging shift towards software-as-a-service and reusable AI platforms is already forcing investors to look beyond the traditional relationship between headcount, billing and revenue.

Second, software companies themselves are moving downstream. Foundation-model and enterprise-software companies are increasingly building forward-deployment capabilities: teams that enter the customer's environment, integrate software with existing systems, adapt workflows and help operationalise AI. This matters because implementation and deployment have historically been the space in which Indian IT companies provided value between software vendors and enterprise customers. If the software provider increasingly deploys and manages its own software, that intermediary space becomes contestable.

Third, multinational companies are increasingly bringing technology capabilities in-house through Global Capability Centres (GCCs). A GCC is fundamentally different from an outsourcing centre: it belongs to the multinational itself and can perform engineering, product development, AI, research and increasingly strategic technology functions. India's GCC ecosystem has expanded rapidly, creating an alternative to the traditional external-provider model. The very enterprise knowledge that once differentiated an IT-services company can increasingly accumulate inside the client organisation.

Fourth, consultancies are moving in the opposite direction. Global consultancy firms have expanded into technology, implementation and AI deployment, challenging IT companies at the higher end of the value chain. The traditional division — consultants decide what should be done, IT companies implement it — is therefore becoming less stable.

The result is a multi-directional squeeze. AI agents attack execution from below. Software companies are moving downstream into deployment. GCCs are internalising the intermediary altogether. Consultancies are moving downward from strategy.

Wipro therefore cannot defend its future simply by becoming a more efficient version of its existing business. The strategic question is where it should move next — and what new assets, capabilities and institutional relationships it can build around that position.

The answer begins by moving beyond the conventional idea of merely climbing the value chain.

V. The Wipro 3.0 Opportunity: Moving Up the Thought Chain

The answer is not simply to move ‘up the value chain’. Wipro needs to move up the thought chain: from execution to optimisation, orchestration and, ultimately, strategy. But this should not mean becoming another management consultancy. Its distinctive opportunity lies in combining strategic understanding with the ability to assemble, deploy, operate and assure the technologies that strategy demands.

1. The first opportunity is multi-agent orchestration. The emerging enterprise AI environment is unlikely to consist of one model or one agent doing everything. Enterprises will increasingly use specialised agents for software development, finance, procurement, cybersecurity, customer service, compliance and other functions, potentially supplied by different technology companies. The strategic opportunity for Wipro is therefore not necessarily to build every agent itself, but to become the vendor-agnostic orchestrator of the agent ecosystem.

That could involve identifying and evaluating specialised agents, licensing or integrating them, connecting them to enterprise systems, coordinating their interactions, determining which agent performs which task, managing human intervention, and providing governance and assurance across the resulting system.

Wipro is already building elements of this architecture. Its WEGA platform describes a composable agent marketplace through which clients can combine Wipro-built and third-party agents, while its wider partner ecosystem explicitly positions Wipro around vendor-agnostic orchestration. Its partnerships with companies such as ServiceNow, Factory and Harness demonstrate the direction of travel.

The strategic ambition should therefore be larger than simply ‘deploying AI’. Wipro could become the company an enterprise approaches with a business problem, leaving Wipro to determine which combination of models, agents, software, data, infrastructure and human oversight should solve it.

This creates an intriguing reversal. The proliferation of AI vendors, rather than eliminating the intermediary, could create a new intermediary role: the trusted architect and orchestrator of a heterogeneous AI ecosystem.

2. The second opportunity is to turn orchestration into platforms and proprietary IP. Every enterprise deployment should generate reusable knowledge. A recurring client problem should not end with a project; it should generate a framework, then a platform, and ultimately an asset that can be deployed repeatedly.

The progression should be:

Client problem → implementation → recurring pattern → framework → platform → proprietary asset.

This is where Wipro's decades of accumulated enterprise experience become particularly valuable. The objective is to convert implementation knowledge into scalable technology, shifting revenue progressively from hours towards licensing, recurring platform revenues, co-creation and outcome-based models.

Wipro's own creation of an AI-Native Business & Platforms unit, explicitly intended to develop enterprise-grade agentic solutions and new AI-led business streams, provides a starting point for such a transition.

3. The third opportunity is strategic technology services. If Wipro can understand the enterprise, orchestrate its technology and operate the resulting systems, it can also move further towards strategy. The company should help clients determine not merely how to deploy AI, but where AI should change the business itself: operating models, products, customer relationships, supply chains, and competitive positioning.

This would create a different proposition from conventional consulting. Wipro's advantage would be the ability to connect boardroom strategy directly to technological architecture and operational execution.

In other words, it would not merely advise on transformation. It would be capable of designing, building and running the transformation.

4. The fourth opportunity is AI assurance. Every deployment of increasingly autonomous AI creates requirements for cybersecurity, governance, compliance, monitoring, auditability, reliability, and resilience. Wipro can build these into a broader AI-assurance business: helping enterprises operate AI environments that can be trusted rather than merely AI systems that can be deployed.

This is particularly important when Wipro is orchestrating agents supplied by multiple vendors. The more heterogeneous the ecosystem, the more valuable the independent layer responsible for security, policy, interoperability, monitoring and accountability becomes.

5. The fifth opportunity is industrial and physical-world AI. Manufacturing plants, energy systems, telecom networks, logistics operations, healthcare systems, and infrastructure cannot be transformed simply by connecting a frontier model to a database. They involve legacy technology, physical processes, safety requirements, regulation and operational constraints.

This ‘industrial friction’ can become a moat. Wipro's accumulated domain and integration knowledge can allow it to translate general-purpose intelligence into systems that actually function in difficult physical and regulatory environments.

6. The sixth opportunity is strategic partnerships and infrastructure. Wipro does not need to own every component of this ecosystem. Indeed, attempting to build everything itself would probably recreate precisely the capital-intensive model it does not need.

It can instead build deep relationships with foundation-model companies, software platforms, semiconductor companies, cloud providers, cybersecurity firms and specialist AI startups. Its existing ecosystem already spans more than 100 partners across hyperscalers, AI-native companies, SaaS providers, and specialist technology firms.

The objective should therefore be architectural ownership, not technological autarky: Wipro should own the enterprise architecture, orchestration, integration, governance, assurance and client relationships - while drawing on the best technologies available across the ecosystem.

Taken together, these possibilities change the strategic proposition fundamentally. Wipro would no longer be primarily the company that supplies engineers to implement somebody else's technology. It could become the company that decides how multiple technologies should work together inside an enterprise, builds the surrounding architecture, operates it and makes it trustworthy.

That is the essence of moving up the thought chain.

And it offers Wipro a way to turn the very fragmentation of the AI ecosystem — which could otherwise threaten its intermediary role — into a new source of strategic value.

VI. Wipro as Client Zero: Transforming the Company Before Transforming Its Clients

Wipro should not merely sell AI-led transformation to its clients. It should make itself the first large-scale laboratory for that transformation.

The idea is already present in Wipro's strategy. The company has described itself as a ‘Client Zero’, deploying AI internally before taking validated solutions to customers. It has been applying AI across functions including software engineering, finance, HR, sales, delivery and customer support, using its own operations to test questions of integration, data readiness, governance and scalability. Its experience with Google Cloud's Gemini Code Assist, for example, has been presented as an internal deployment from which lessons can subsequently be taken to clients.

For Wipro 3.0, however, Client Zero should become much more than an internal productivity programme. It should become a deliberate method of corporate reinvention.

Wipro should use its own organisation to experiment with the very architecture it intends to build for customers: multi-agent workflows, AI-assisted software engineering, automated enterprise processes, AI governance, cybersecurity, assurance, knowledge management and new human-machine operating models. Every successful deployment should generate not merely an efficiency gain, but organisational knowledge that can be codified into methodologies, platforms, products and client offerings.

The resulting loop could be powerful:

Transform Wipro → learn → codify → productise → deploy for clients → learn again.

This also changes the economics of AI adoption. If Wipro discovers how to redesign an entire finance function around AI agents, for instance, the resulting operating model can become part of its transformation offering to other enterprises. If it develops effective multi-agent software engineering practices internally, those practices can inform client deployments. If it develops reliable governance and assurance mechanisms for autonomous systems, those can become components of its AI-assurance business.

In this model, Wipro's own transformation becomes a source of intellectual property.

There is an important cultural implication as well. A company cannot credibly advise clients to reorganise around AI while maintaining an essentially pre-AI organisation internally. Client Zero therefore creates a form of institutional authenticity: Wipro can demonstrate what it recommends because it has already experienced the technological, organisational and human difficulties itself.

The objective should not, however, be indiscriminate automation or simply reducing employee numbers. The more ambitious goal is to discover what an AI-native technology company looks like: which work should be automated, which should be augmented, which decisions require human judgement, how teams should be organised, what new supervisory roles are required and how accountability should operate when humans and autonomous systems work together.

That makes Client Zero the bridge between Wipro's technological strategy and its workforce transformation.

Before Wipro transforms its clients, it should transform Wipro. And before it sells that transformation as a service, it should learn from doing it itself.

VII. The Human Transformation: Building the Wipro 3.0 Workforce

If Wipro is to become Client Zero for AI-led enterprise transformation, its own workforce cannot remain organised around the economics of the previous era.

The traditional IT-services career was relatively linear:

Graduate → coder → project resource → senior engineer/manager.

Wipro 3.0 requires a more heterogeneous workforce. Some routine execution will increasingly be performed by AI, while the value of human professionals will shift towards domain expertise, judgement, orchestration, assurance and strategic problem-solving.

A possible pathway is:

Graduate → apprentice → AI-augmented professional → domain specialist → orchestrator/assurance specialist → architect or strategist.

This makes the treatment of fresh graduates particularly important. If entry-level software work is increasingly automated, companies cannot simply reduce graduate intake and expect the next generation of expertise to emerge automatically. They need to develop apprenticeship programs. Colleges/universities can provide disciplinary foundations; IT companies like Wipro can provide supervised exposure to enterprise systems, industry domains, AI deployment, cybersecurity, governance, and real-world problem-solving.

The result should be a more T-shaped trained professional: deep expertise in a domain or technical discipline, combined with the ability to work across AI systems, enterprise software and organisational processes.

Wipro's Client Zero program can become the training ground for its current workforce. Employees should learn by participating in the company's own AI transformation: supervising agents, validating outputs, redesigning workflows, securing systems, managing exceptions and determining where human judgement remains indispensable. Successful internal practices can then become part of the capabilities Wipro takes to clients.

This is also why AI-led workforce transformation should not be reduced to a headcount-reduction exercise. The strategic objective is to change the composition and productivity of human capability. A smaller number of highly capable professionals, working with increasingly powerful AI systems and supported by deep domain expertise, can potentially create more value than a generic execution-heavy workforce.

For Wipro, the transition is therefore from treating people primarily as billable capacity to treating them as institutional technological capability.

That requires a different approach to recruitment, apprenticeship, reskilling, career progression, and internal mobility. It also requires Wipro to become a place where employees learn how AI changes organisations by actually participating in that transformation.

The workforce transformation and the business transformation are consequently inseparable. Wipro cannot build Wipro 3.0 with a Wipro 2.0 workforce model.

VIII. The Real Constraint Is Sociological

The technology required for Wipro 3.0 is increasingly available. Wipro has access to capital, global clients, engineering talent and a large ecosystem of technology partners. It is already investing in AI, platforms, consulting and cybersecurity. The problem, therefore, is unlikely to be a shortage of technology.

The harder constraint is sociological.

Wipro's present institutional architecture was largely formed during the great expansion of Indian IT services. That era rewarded headcount growth, utilisation, predictable margins, large outsourcing contracts, and incremental improvements in delivery. These were rational responses to the market that Wipro had successfully created and occupied.

But the next model requires different behaviours.

Building platforms and proprietary IP requires long-horizon investment before revenues become visible. Moving into strategic technology requires different kinds of expertise and a willingness to challenge established client relationships. AI orchestration requires experimentation across competing technologies. Assurance requires investment in capabilities whose value may only become obvious when something goes wrong. Industrial AI requires patience with complex, sector-specific deployments.

None of these fits neatly into the old logic of maximising utilisation and quarterly predictability.

This is why Wipro 3.0 cannot be achieved simply by creating another AI division or acquiring a collection of technology companies. The organisation must change the way it thinks about risk, capital, talent, time and value creation.

The board is therefore central.

Its first question should not be:

"How do we restore Wipro's growth?"

It should be:

"What should Wipro become over the next decade?"

Once that destination is established, the implications for acquisitions, partnerships, research, platforms, workforce development and capital allocation become clearer.

This is also where the distinction between technological and sociological transformation becomes important. Technology can provide the means of transformation, but institutions determine whether those means are actually used. A company can possess excellent engineers and access to the world's leading AI platforms but still remain trapped in an inherited business model if its incentives reward defending that model above all else.

Wipro therefore needs a different institutional balance: protect the profitable core while deliberately creating businesses capable of eventually becoming the next core.

That means giving long-horizon initiatives sufficient capital and managerial attention to survive their early years, while establishing clear milestones for learning and eventual scale. It means rewarding the creation of reusable intellectual property, not only the successful completion of client projects. It means valuing engineers and domain specialists not merely according to their immediate billability, but according to the technological capabilities they help create.

Above all, it means accepting that reinvention involves cannibalising parts of one's own success.

The greatest danger for Wipro may not be that AI disrupts its existing business. It may be that the organisation becomes so committed to protecting the economics of Wipro 2.0 that it prevents Wipro 3.0 from emerging.

The transformation is technological in its destination. But it is sociological in its starting point.

IX. The Premji Question: Applying Long-Horizon Vision to Wipro Itself

There is a curious irony in Wipro's present predicament. The Premji family has demonstrated no shortage of long-horizon thinking about changing India. The question is whether that same intellectual ambition can now be applied to changing Wipro.

I encountered a small example of this philosophy at the beginning of my own professional career, when I joined the Azim Premji Foundation. During our induction at the Wipro Corporate Center in Bengaluru, the foundation's senior CEO (and former Wipro executive) Dilip Ranjekar narrated to us that, around 2000, Azim Premji had been considering the creation of a philanthropic foundation. At a meeting at Premji's house, he asked Ranjekar a simple question: what would be the most peaceful way to bring about lasting change in Indian society? They concluded was that education should be the principal lever, and this led to the foundation's long-term focus on education.

Philanthropy and corporate transformation are, of course, fundamentally different enterprises. A philanthropic organisation does not possess a democratic mandate to determine the direction of society, however well-intentioned its objectives may be. Its role must coexist with, and not bypass or override, elected democratic mandate and public accountability.

But precisely because the two domains are different, the contrast is striking. If the Premji family can think in decades about building institutions intended to change Indian society, why should Wipro's own transformation be approached primarily through quarterly performance, incremental strategy, and preservation of an inherited business model?

Wipro itself created much of the wealth that made that philanthropic institution-building possible. There is therefore a certain historical symmetry in asking the family and the company's leadership to apply the same seriousness of purpose to the enterprise itself.

The task is arguably simpler in one respect. Wipro does not need to change Indian society through a single intervention. It needs to determine what kind of technology institution it should become, and then align its board, management, capital, talent, and organisational capabilities around that objective.

That begins with the board. The question is not merely whether Wipro has directors with sufficient technological knowledge. It is whether its governing institution possesses the imagination and appetite for long-horizon corporate reinvention.

The next Wipro may require precisely the quality of thinking that produced the previous one: the willingness to look beyond the successful institution inherited from the previous generation and ask what institution the next technological era requires.

X. Rishad Premji and the Wipro 3.0 Moment

This brings the argument back to the generational question.

Hashim Premji founded Wipro in 1945. Azim Premji inherited it in 1966 and, beginning in 1980, gradually transformed it from a diversified consumer and industrial business into a technology company, a transformation ultimately formalised by the 2013 demerger of the non-IT businesses. Rishad Premji now inherits the product of that transformation.

His challenge is therefore not to preserve his father's Wipro indefinitely.

It is to ask whether the conditions that made his father's Wipro successful are themselves changing.

The generational symmetry is striking:

Hashim Premji: built the original Wipro.

Azim Premji: transformed Wipro into a technology company.

Rishad Premji: has the opportunity to transform that technology company into an AI-era technology institution.

This should not be understood as a rejection of Azim Premji's legacy. Quite the opposite. The most faithful way to honour that legacy may be to reproduce its defining quality: the willingness to depart from an inherited business model when technological circumstances demand it.

The year 1980 can therefore serve as more than a historical date. It represents a particular corporate disposition: seeing a technological discontinuity, taking a long-horizon bet before its outcome is obvious, building capabilities around it and eventually reorganising the company around the new reality.

Wipro 3.0 requires the spirit of 1980 applied to the technological realities of 2026.

The circumstances are, of course, different. Wipro is no longer a relatively diversified Indian company entering an embryonic technology industry. It is a global technology-services institution facing a world in which AI is changing the economics of software, enterprise technology and knowledge work. The transformation required today is consequently more complex: Wipro must move from services towards orchestration, platforms, strategic technology and assurance while simultaneously rebuilding its workforce and operating model around AI.

But the underlying leadership challenge is remarkably similar.

Azim Premji once had to ask: What should Wipro become now?

Rishad Premji may need to ask the same question again.

And the answer cannot simply be ‘a more AI-enabled Wipro’. That would amount to adding a new technology to Wipro 2.0. The ambition should be larger: to build an institution whose business model, workforce, intellectual property and organisational culture are native to the AI era.

That is the difference between adopting AI and creating Wipro 3.0.

XI. IBM: Reinvention as an Institutional Capability

IBM is useful here not because Wipro should become IBM, but because IBM demonstrates something more fundamental: technological reinvention can become an institutional capability rather than a once-in-a-generation act of leadership.

IBM has repeatedly changed the composition of its business as technology has changed. Its transformation under Lou Gerstner in the 1990s shifted the company towards integrated technology and services. Later, under Ginni Rometty, IBM substantially repositioned its portfolio around cloud, security, data, and AI, including the acquisition of Red Hat. The significance for Wipro is not any particular IBM product or acquisition. It is the willingness to change the company's centre of gravity.

IBM subsequently separated Kyndryl and reorganised itself around software, infrastructure, and consultancy - while building its current strategy around hybrid cloud and AI. Its present architecture deliberately combines software, infrastructure, and consultancy rather than treating them as isolated businesses.

That is particularly relevant to Wipro 3.0. The company Wipro needs to become will likewise not fit neatly into the old category of ‘IT services’. Its potential future architecture — AI orchestration, platforms and IP, industrial AI, assurance, and strategic technology partnerships — will cut across conventional business categories.

There is another IBM lesson that fits the argument particularly well: the company's ability to combine technology development with enterprise deployment. IBM's current hybrid-cloud and AI strategy is explicitly focused on taking AI from experimentation into production, including the orchestration, performance, and governance of AI models and agents across enterprise environments. Its consultancy business combines strategy, implementation, and ongoing management rather than treating these as separate stages. That is remarkably close to the role I have proposed for Wipro.

IBM's quantum strategy provides an even more forward-looking example. Its commitment to the Amaravati Quantum Valley, alongside TCS, L&T, and the Andhra Pradesh government, goes beyond placing a quantum computer in India. The initiative is intended to create an ecosystem around quantum computing involving hardware, algorithms, applications, industrial experimentation, research, and education. The planned IBM quantum computer is planned as the centre around which researchers, startups, enterprises, and can develop applications and capabilities.

This is particularly instructive for Wipro. The lesson is not that Wipro should imitate IBM by entering quantum computing for its own sake. It is that a technology company should position itself early around technological discontinuities, build capabilities before their full commercial value becomes obvious, and participate in the ecosystems that emerge around them.

That principle could be applied by Wipro not only to quantum computing, but also to quantum-safe cybersecurity, advanced computing, industrial AI, and other technologies that may reshape enterprise technology over the coming decade.

Indeed, there is an interesting historical symmetry here.

In 1980, Azim Premji positioned Wipro around computing while the technology industry was still emerging in India.

Today, IBM is positioning itself around technologies such as AI and quantum computing while their eventual economic boundaries are still being formed.

Wipro 3.0 should recover precisely this capacity for technological anticipation: not merely adopting technologies once markets have matured, but building institutional capabilities around the technological discontinuities that are likely to define the next market.

The lesson, therefore, is not ‘copy IBM’.

It is simpler:

Never allow the business model that made a technology company successful to become its permanent definition.

Wipro has already demonstrated this principle once. IBM demonstrates what happens when reinvention becomes a recurring organisational habit.

Wipro 3.0 should make that habit permanent.

XII. Beyond IT: Rediscovering Innovation Across Wipro Businesses 

Wipro 3.0 should not necessarily stop at the technology business.

Wipro's consumer-products heritage is important precisely because it reminds us that the company did not begin as an IT company. Its consumer-care business, now housed within Wipro Enterprises, remains a substantial business with brands across personal care, home care, wellness and related categories. More importantly, it has already begun engaging with the new consumer economy through Wipro Consumer Care Ventures, which invests in digital-first and D2C companies in India and Southeast Asia and seeks to support them with its own domain knowledge.

That is a useful beginning, but the transformation of Wipro's consumer business should go further.

The consumer industry is itself undergoing a structural transition. New-age consumer brands are growing considerably faster than established FMCG markets, using  e-commerce, including quick e-commerce, and rapid product innovation to identify unmet consumer needs. Quick e-commerce has become an increasingly important channel: in FY26 it accounted for 60-75 percent of the online sales of several major FMCG companies, while companies are increasingly launching products specifically for digital channels. Product-development cycles are also being compressed dramatically, with some launches moving from annual planning cycles towards months or even weeks.

For established consumer companies, this changes the nature of competition. Brand scale and distribution remain valuable, but they are no longer sufficient. Consumer intelligence, rapid experimentation, digital-native product development, personalised marketing, supply-chain responsiveness, and the ability to take a product from idea to market quickly are becoming strategic capabilities.

Wipro Consumer Care should therefore become a Client Zero for AI-led consumer innovation as well.

AI could be deployed across consumer research, demand sensing, product formulation, packaging, pricing, marketing, distribution, and supply-chain planning. Consumer data and digital channels could allow much faster experimentation with products, propositions, and markets. The objective should not simply be to use AI to make the existing FMCG machine more efficient, but to create a faster and more experimental consumer-products organisation.

Its existing venture activity provides an unusual advantage. Rather than viewing D-to-C startups merely as competitors, Wipro can treat them as sources of technology, consumer insight, business models, and entrepreneurial talent. It can invest, partner, acquire selectively, and learn from them — while using the scale, manufacturing capabilities, and distribution experience of its established brands to take successful innovations further.

This could produce a distinctive model:

Established brands + D2C experimentation + AI-enabled consumer intelligence + digital distribution + rapid product innovation.

The strategic objective would not be to recreate the consumer business of the past. It would be to recover the product-building instinct that existed in Wipro before the company became synonymous with IT services.

That would also complete an important part of the Wipro 3.0 argument. The transformation should not mean abandoning Wipro's history in favour of another fashionable technology. It should mean recovering the organisational capacity that made the company capable of transformation in the first place.

The company that once moved from vegetable oils into computing should not be afraid of reinventing its consumer-products business again.

Wipro 3.0 should therefore be a transformation of entire Wipro, not merely a transformation of Wipro IT.

XIII. From Nifty 50 Exit to Wipro 3.0

The significance of Wipro's impending Nifty 50 exit is therefore not that the company has suddenly become a failed business. It has not. The index decision is mechanical, based on free-float market capitalisation, and Wipro remains a large, profitable global technology company. But the symbolism is difficult to ignore: from September 30, 2026, BSE Ltd will replace Wipro in the benchmark index, after BSE's six-month average free-float market capitalisation reached ₹1,40,879 crore against Wipro's ₹55,930 crore.

Nor should Wipro respond to the event by attempting merely to recover its old position. The more useful question is why the company should want to return to the Nifty 50 as the same company it was before.

The market's message, properly interpreted, is not "become the old Wipro again". It is: create a Wipro whose future growth deserves a different valuation.

That is why the distinction between Wipro 2.0 and Wipro 3.0 matters.

Wipro 2.0 was built around the extraordinary opportunity of global IT outsourceeing. It created enormous value for shareholders, employees and clients and established Wipro as one of India's most important technology companies. It would be a mistake to regard that achievement as a failure simply because its economic foundations are now under pressure.

But Wipro 3.0 cannot be built by defending Wipro 2.0 indefinitely.

The company now has an unusual combination of assets: decades of embedded enterprise knowledge, hundreds of thousands of technology professionals, global client relationships, consultancy capabilities, a substantial partner ecosystem, emerging AI platforms, and an established presence across industries. These are precisely the assets from which a new technology institution can be constructed.

The transformation I am proposing is consequently not a rejection of Wipro's existing capabilities. It is their recombination.

Services become a deployment and learning engine. Repeated deployment experience is codified into frameworks, platforms and proprietary IP. Those assets strengthen Wipro's ability to orchestrate increasingly heterogeneous enterprise technology ecosystems — including agents, models, software, data and human workflows. 

And as Wipro moves from executing technological decisions towards designing and orchestrating them, it moves progressively up the thought chain: from execution to optimisation, from optimisation to orchestration, and from orchestration towards strategy.

Across this architecture sits AI assurance — cybersecurity, governance, compliance, monitoring, reliability and resilience — while Wipro itself serves as Client Zero, continuously testing the technologies and organisational models it subsequently takes to clients.

That is a fundamentally different corporate proposition from traditional outsourceeing.

It also creates a more durable relationship between Wipro and its clients. Instead of being paid primarily to supply technological execution, Wipro could increasingly be paid to determine how an enterprise should transform, assemble the technologies required, operate them, secure them, and continuously improve them.

The result would be a company that participates in a much larger share of the enterprise technology thought chain.

The opportunity is not without risk. Wipro may fail to execute. AI may compress the deployment gap faster than anticipated. Foundation-model and software companies may capture more of the orchestration layer. GCCs may continue internalising capabilities. Competitors may build stronger platforms or assurance businesses. The transformation will require capital and patience at precisely the moment when markets may demand immediate financial improvement.

But these are arguments for disciplined transformation, not for postponing it.

The alternative is more dangerous: using every quarter's financial performance to justify preserving the business model that produced the problem.

Wipro's history offers a better precedent. In 1980, Azim Premji did not protect Wipro's identity as a consumer products and industrial components company when he saw a technological future emerging. He began building the capabilities that would eventually transform the company. Four decades later, Wipro needs another such act of institutional imagination.

The Nifty 50 exit is therefore best understood not as the end of Wipro's story, but as a useful moment of reckoning.

Wipro does not need to become the company it was when it entered the Nifty 50. It needs to become the company that deserves to define the next generation of Indian technology.

That is the opportunity of Wipro 3.0.

XIV. Conclusion: The Spirit That Built Wipro 2.0 Must Build Wipro 3.0

Wipro's present predicament should not be understood simply as the decline of an old IT-services company. It is a test of whether a successful technology institution can reinvent itself before technological and market forces compel it to do so.

The ingredients are already there.

Wipro has the enterprise relationships, engineering talent, domain knowledge, global reach, and partner ecosystem required to build a much more ambitious technology business. It has begun investing in AI, platforms, consultancy, cybersecurity, and agentic technologies. It has even begun using itself as Client Zero. What remains uncertain is whether these initiatives will add up to a transformation of the institution, or remain a collection of initiatives around an essentially unchanged business model.

That distinction is decisive.

Wipro 3.0 should not mean abandoning IT services. It should mean changing what services accomplish. Services and deployment should become engines of learning; repeated experience should be codified into frameworks, platforms and proprietary IP; those assets should strengthen Wipro's ability to orchestrate increasingly heterogeneous enterprise technology; and that orchestration should enable the company to move progressively up the thought chain, from execution and optimisation towards strategy.

AI assurance — cybersecurity, governance, compliance, monitoring, reliability and resilience — should surround the entire architecture. Wipro itself should remain Client Zero, continuously transforming its own organisation and workforce, learning from that transformation and carrying the resulting capabilities to clients.

And the ambition should not stop with Wipro IT. The consumer-products business can also become a laboratory for AI-enabled product innovation, rapid product design & development, and new consumer models. The objective is not simply to make individual businesses more efficient, but to restore to Wipro the institutional capacity to reinvent businesses.

This is why the question ultimately belongs at the board level.

The technological transition is already underway. The harder question is whether Wipro's governing institution is prepared to make the long-horizon decisions that transformation requires: allocating capital before returns are obvious, accepting experimentation and failure, rewarding intellectual-property creation, developing new forms of talent, and allowing tomorrow's businesses eventually to cannibalise parts of today's.

Azim Premji once made such a decision. A company founded in 1945 to manufacture vegetable ghee and cooking oil began its technological transformation in 1980 and eventually became one of India's leading global technology companies. The achievement was not merely that Wipro entered IT. It was that Wipro changed what it was.

Rishad Premji now has an opportunity of comparable historical significance.

He does not need to reproduce his father's Wipro. He needs to rediscover the spirit that made that transformation possible.

IBM demonstrates that technological reinvention can become a recurring institutional capability. Wipro's own history demonstrates that it can do this at least once. The challenge now is to make reinvention a permanent characteristic of the company rather than an extraordinary event separated by generations.

The Nifty 50 exit may therefore be less important than what Wipro does with the warning.

It can treat the event as a loss of status and attempt to recover its former position.

Or it can treat it as an invitation to build a different company.

The first option is about defending Wipro 2.0.

The second is about creating Wipro 3.0.

For a company whose greatest transformation began when its leadership decided that its existing identity did not have to determine its future, the choice should not be unfamiliar.

Wipro has reinvented itself before.

It is time to do it again.