India's pitch to global corporations was almost embarrassingly easy to make for almost a decade. Deep talent pools, cost efficiency, and engineers who would outwork and out-deliver their counterparts almost anywhere else in the world. Global capability centres grew steadily, headcounts scaled, and somewhere along the way, India quietly became the backbone of the world's enterprise technology infrastructure.

That story is not wrong. It is just no longer the whole story. The organisations still competing on the same value proposition they used in 2018 are now losing ground, not dramatically or all at once, but steadily, and in the places that matter most.