Hexaware Bets on Agentic AI to Take a Bite of Low-Code SaaS Market

Mumbai-based IT services major Hexaware Technologies has rolled out a new agentic AI offering to target no-code, low-code SaaS workflows. The company earlier this week announced the launch of 'Zero License', a new enterprise offering designed to help organizations replace bloated SaaS workflows with agentic AI in months, not years.

The launch comes as the Indian and global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry has been rattled by new AI tools that are targeting workflows in legal, finance and marketing. It has led to a sharp sell-off of IT stocks worldwide.

At Hexaware, the company is planning to target low-code, no-code applications that have non-complex workflows, explains Siddharth Dhar, President & Global Head, Digital IT Operations & AI. These applications are used to enable users to create web and mobile applications using visual, drag-and-drop interfaces instead of traditional, hand-written programming languages

“What we’re doing is using a combination of AI and reverse engineering to potentially allow our customers to rewrite workflows they have in SaaS applications, either as AI agents or as cloud-native applications," he told Outlook Business.

Adding that they are looking at low-code, no-code applications, non-complex workflows, form-based applications and legacy middleware.

"If you look at low-code, no-code platforms, we are targeting workflows that have been built into applications like Pega, ServiceNow and Force.com. Salesforce is a CRM company, but the Force platform is a low-code, no-code environment where you can take a business or IT workflow and build it into an application. It is this low-code, no-code aspect of SaaS platforms that we are focusing on, because in most cases these are simple applications," said Dhar.

The company is focused on first taking a bite of the SaaS market, which is of $420 billion as per market research firm Canalys (part of Omdia). It is led by players like Alphabet, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Databricks, Snowflake, Zoho and others. As per Gartner, the low-code application platform (LCAP) market is forecast to be $16.5 billion by 2027 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.3% from 2022–2027, creating a growth opportunity for current vendors and new market entrants.

“The SaaS environment globally accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars every year in deployment, maintenance and the development of new applications. It represents a tremendous amount of industry spending on these kinds of applications. Even if we make a small dent in that, we are talking about billions of dollars. For Hexaware, this is one of the ways forward," said Siddharth Dhar.

Cost Take Out in Focus

The offering comes at a time IT sector analysts say businesses are focused on cost takeout or vendor consolidations to reduce their tech spending or redeploy them in a more productive way. Hexaware's Zero License addresses this by shifting the focus from managing tools to executing outcomes. Instead of adding yet another layer of software, the offering introduces an AI operating layer over existing systems.

While Hexaware Digital IT Operations & AI Chief agrees that the strategy behind Zero License is partly to take advantage of cost takeout, he claims it's also to "accelerate AI adoption internally."

"Quite frankly, not everybody is adopting AI at the pace they should, and some organisations are genuinely struggling with it. What a programme like this does is accelerate the adoption of AI, because there is no way to deliver this without extensively leveraging it," Dhar said, adding that not only does AI get embedded in the programme, it also becomes embedded within the organisation.