When Google's new head of Internal Systems began consolidating the company's sprawling vendor ecosystem, the decision sent quiet tremors through India's IT services industry. HCLTech, a pillar of that industry, found itself among the firms losing ground — not through failure, but through a structural shift in how technology giants now conceive of partnership and labor. The episode is less a story about one company's misfortune than a signal of a deeper reckoning: the age of scaling human effort as a competitive advantage may be giving way to an age where software replaces the need for that eff