Citrini Research, a macro-focused investment publication, dropped a fascinating thought experiment over the weekend. It's framed as a fictional "Macro Memo" dated June 30, 2028, and it sketches a nightmare scenario for India's massive IT services sector.
The piece, titled "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis," is explicitly labeled a scenario, not a prediction. But its implications are stark enough that equity traders and anyone with skin in the Indian tech game should probably pay attention. It's a classic "what if" exercise, but the "what if" is pretty terrifying if you're in the business of selling software development labor.
The central thesis is simple, brutal, and hinges on one big assumption: if AI capabilities keep improving at their current clip, the cost of writing software could collapse toward zero. And if that happens, the entire economic model of India's $200 billion-a-year IT export industry—built on providing skilled but cheaper labor—gets gutted.
The $200 Billion Export Implosion
At the heart of Citrini's scenario is a brutal reassessment of India's competitive moat. For decades, the value proposition was straightforward: Indian developers cost a fraction of their American or European counterparts. That labor arbitrage built giants and fueled an export engine.
That moat, the authors argue, evaporates when AI enters the picture in a big way. "The marginal cost of an AI coding agent had collapsed to, essentially, the cost of electricity," the note states. In this fictional 2028, the big players—Infosys Ltd. (INFY), Wipro Ltd. (WIT), and Tata Consultancy Services—"saw contract cancellations accelerate through 2027."
Think about the scale here. India currently exports over $200 billion annually in IT services. The research note describes this as "the single largest contributor to India's current account surplus and the offset that financed its persistent goods trade deficit." It's a huge piece of the national economic puzzle.
In Citrini's story, as that surplus evaporates, the dominoes start to fall. The rupee plunges 18% against the dollar in just four months. The turmoil gets so bad that by the first quarter of 2028, the International Monetary Fund is starting "preliminary discussions" with New Delhi. It's a full-blown macro crisis, triggered by a tech disruption.
How Agentic Coding Triggers the Cascade
So how do we get from here to there in this fictional timeline? Citrini traces the disruption to late 2025, when so-called agentic coding tools take a major leap forward. Think tools like Claude Code and Codex becoming so powerful that a skilled developer can recreate a mid-market software-as-a-service product in weeks, not years.
This reshapes a fundamental corporate decision: buy versus build. If a Fortune 500 company realizes it can internally replicate a six-figure software solution in a matter of weeks, the case for signing a massive, multi-year offshore IT contract with Wipro or Infosys starts to look pretty weak. The outsourcing model begins to erode from the bottom up.
The authors are careful to hedge. This is a thought experiment, not a forecast. "We are certain some of these scenarios won't materialize," they write. "We're equally certain that machine intelligence will continue to accelerate." The point isn't that this exact future will happen, but that the forces capable of creating it are very real and already in motion. It's a memo from a possible future, asking a very pressing question about the present.
