Quess once staffed India’s factories. Now, it is putting AI agents to work-OxBig News Network

The question might have sounded abstract—if it weren’t coming from the founder of one of India’s largest staffing companies.

Quess Corp, which Isaac built from the ground up, now places more than 630,000 people in jobs across the country: factory workers, security guards, hospital staff, telecom technicians. It’s a company that’s defined employment in its most literal sense—shift rosters, salary slips, onboarding kiosks.

And yet, here was its founder, in a Bengaluru boardroom earlier this year, asking who should take care of the company’s newest hires.

No one in the room laughed. Not because the idea was funny, but because they’d already seen it happening.

One of the AI agents, or software coworkers, Nikki, was already on the org chart with a title—chief listening officer. Others were handling loan recovery, screening job applicants, guiding call centre representatives through angry customer calls, or checking in with employees about morale.

Isaac wasn’t being rhetorical either. He had spent three decades in HR or human resources, starting at Godrej & Boyce in the 1990s, then running staffing operations for Adecco across India and the Middle East. He knew what it meant to manage people at scale: grievances, burnout, ambition, trust.

But this was something new. These agents performed. And someone, he argued, would have to be accountable for that performance.

“If we’re hiring thousands of artificial workers,” he said later, “we might genuinely need someone to manage their training, reviews, maybe even their well-being.”

Digitide Solutions, a spinoff from Quess Corp, is barely a quarter old. It already employs more than 55,000. Increasingly, the company’s workforce will include AI agents.

For a country adding a million job seekers each month, where employment is both political currency and personal identity, the shift feels almost subversive.

Isaac once built Quess by giving more people jobs than perhaps anyone else in India’s private sector. Now, he and Digitide chief executive officer (CEO) Gurmeet Chahal are betting that the future of employment in India may not be entirely human at all.

What they’re building is a blueprint for managing a new kind of labour force. One that never clocks in, never calls in sick—and still needs to be led.

Not just a gigafactory

“We’ve moved away from being a gigafactory of people,” Isaac said. “Today, we’re a structurally important company for India.”

That’s not a line for a pitch deck. Quess Corp’s operational footprint includes maintaining 100 hospitals with 21,000 beds, managing 200,000 telecom towers, and overseeing 390 million sq. ft of public and private real estate.

“These are population-scale numbers,” Isaac said. “Not isolated figures from a single geography.”

That scale wasn’t always obvious. When Isaac founded Quess in 2007, it was seen as another contract staffing firm—useful, low-margin and invisible in the larger outsourcing narrative. That perception began to change in 2012, when Fairfax invested ₹250 crore in the company. “It gave us capital, yes,” Isaac said. “But it also gave us room to think beyond headcount.”

The next inflection came in 2016 with Quess’ initial public offering (IPO), followed quickly by a ₹870 crore institutional placement. Isaac used the proceeds to acquire firms like Tata Business Support Services, Allsec Technologies and MFX. The company that once deployed field staff to client sites now had its own tech capabilities and balance sheet strength to expand further.

“We used public markets deliberately,” Isaac said. “We raised money, acquired the right companies and used stock as currency. That’s how we built a platform.”

But building scale wasn’t just about capital. It was about redefining what Quess wanted to be. The turning point, Isaac said, was recognizing that Quess wasn’t just placing people—it was quietly running parts of India’s national infrastructure.

The turning point, Isaac said, was recognizing that Quess wasn’t just placing people—it was quietly running parts of India’s national infrastructure.

By the early 2020s, the company’s business extended well beyond staffing. Its teams were running back-end operations for banks, managing airport terminals and coordinating logistics for large public programmes.

“People don’t see our logo,” Isaac said. “But if the lights stay on and the network holds, there’s a good chance our people are behind it.”

With the 2025 demerger and the birth of Digitide, Quess finally made that shift explicit. It no longer just staffed projects. It delivered them.

The org chart: Rewired

“Initially, it looked like AI might consume our tech business,” Isaac said. “But over time, we realized it was an enabler.”

That realization didn’t come from a white paper or a keynote. It came from watching patterns unfold inside the company. By 2020, Quess had acquired several mid-sized firms. That gave the company the delivery infrastructure across business process management and information technology (IT) services. But what hadn’t yet clicked was how software could change how that infrastructure operated.

“AI wasn’t replacing us,” Isaac said. “It was showing us a better way to scale what we already did.”

The more they looked, the more the overlaps became obvious. Software agents had moved from pilot to production.

They were filtering resumes, deciding loan repayment priorities and guiding call centre agents through complex conversations. What began as a question—“Should we add AI?”—became something closer to an imperative: How deep can we go?

“We decided to go all in,” Isaac said.

Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, former chairman and managing director of Cognizant India, sees this as a moment of re-imagination, not iteration. “The current structural shifts in technology demand a comprehensive rewiring of the business, operating and financial models,” he said. “Not just Quess—every growth company must ask: if we were to build this again from scratch, how would we do it?”

That meant reorganizing the company, separating the AI-intensive operations into a standalone entity, and giving it capital, independence, and a clear mandate. Digitide was born.

Inside Digitide, the logic of the business was refactored around a plan Chahal now calls the three-by-three-by-three. “Three revenue goals. Three core verticals. Three service lines,” he said. The verticals: insurance, healthcare and financial services. The services: digital engineering, analytics and business process management. “It helped us focus,” Chahal said. “We knew where to build, where to buy and what to walk away from.”

What followed wasn’t an AI lab or a splashy proof of concept. It was structure: human agents guided by software agents; algorithms deciding collections routes; agent Nikki quietly tracking employee morale. It wasn’t about chasing automation. It was about control—about doing more with the team already in place.

Meet the listening officer

Digitide doesn’t just deploy AI behind the scenes. It gives some of its agents names, titles and very real responsibilities.

Take Nikki, the chief listening officer. Managers across the company use her to stay ahead of attrition. “If I’m managing 60 people, I can ask Nikki to check in every three months,” Chahal said. “She talks to employees and comes back with a simple report—these four people need attention.”

It’s not surveillance. It’s a workaround to the limitations of scale. “People open up to her,” Chahal added. “Because she’s not their boss.”

QBuddy works differently. It sits inside call centres, where agents manage more than a billion customer interactions every year. “That’s three every second,” Chahal said. QBuddy listens in on live conversations, pulls up customer history and offers real-time cues: what to say next, how to say it and when to slow down if frustration builds.

In collections, DigiColleqt helps 14,000 agents cover nearly every postal code in India.

Not all of these tools were built from scratch. Some came from partnerships. One example stood out. “There was a startup with an excellent voice bot,” Chahal said. “But they didn’t understand collections—how to handle objections, when to push, when to pause.”

Digitide didn’t dismiss the tool. Instead, it layered its own collections intelligence on top, white-labelled it and took it to clients in the US. “They had tech. We had the domain. Together it worked,” Chahal said.

AI in the trenches

The impact of Digitide’s AI shows up less on dashboards—and more on the ground.

Start with collections. Digitide employs more than 14,000 field agents, covering almost every postal code in India. Until recently, they’d start the day with a static list: names, addresses and no sense of priority. “We used to give them a printed list,” Chahal said. “Now, DigiColleqt ranks the day based on who’s most likely to pay.”

If an agent’s already in the neighbourhood, the app points out who else might be worth knocking on. It doesn’t just sort visits—it decides, too. Say someone offers to settle a ₹1,000 debt for ₹900—no phone calls, no delays. “Earlier, the agent would call for approval,” Chahal said. “Now, the system checks the thresholds and clears it right away.”

That combination—better routing, faster closure—has changed how the job gets done.

Hiring has shifted, too. The early stages of screening, once handed to junior recruiters, now go through AI agents trained by senior leaders. Candidates schedule interviews on their own time—sometimes late at night—and the bot conducts them without bias, without burnout. “A candidate can do the interview at 11pm,” Chahal said. “And the AI scores them fairly.”

In payroll, where Digitide processes 15 million payslips a year, AI runs in the background. It catches a mistake before someone’s pay hits their account. That’s what matters.

Across all three areas—collections, hiring and payroll—the changes aren’t about replacing people. “The people are still in the loop,” Chahal said. “But AI gives them back the time to focus where it counts.”

From vendor to rival

For much of its history, Quess supported the giants of Indian outsourcing, supplying staffing muscle to companies like Infosys, Cognizant and Tech Mahindra. That’s no longer the case.

“We’re now getting into $50-100 million RFPs (request for proposals),” Chahal said. “Five years ago, we weren’t even part of the conversation.”

Digitide doesn’t pitch like a traditional IT services firm. It offers full-stack delivery models with AI built in from day one. And it doesn’t need to protect legacy revenue, which gives it pricing flexibility. “We can go into a $10 million deal and say we’ll do it for $7 million—with efficiency backed by AI,” Chahal said. “That’s new money for us.”

Speed is another advantage. “We don’t have old platforms to defend,” Chahal added. “We’re building clean.”

Ramamoorthy sees this agility as a serious advantage. “Smaller, nimbler companies can leapfrog incumbents because they’re not burdened by legacy,” he said. “Legacy is poison—especially during high-velocity change.”

That said, larger players aren’t out of the game, he continued. “They have the money, the client access, and the ecosystem relationships to catch up fast—if they move with discipline.”

Beyond headcount

That pitch isn’t abstract. It’s operational. AI cuts unit costs. Field agents close more calls. Recruiters spend less time on manual screening. Call centre agents handle more cases, with fewer escalations.

“We’re delivering outcomes—not just hours,” Chahal stressed. “We’ve stopped talking about headcount. It’s the architecture that matters now.”

That, Chahal believes, will matter more than headcount in the years ahead.

Digitide currently employs 55,000 people. By the time it triples revenue, from $342 million in 2024-25 to the projected $1 billion in 2028-29, its headcount is expected to grow by only 70%—to around 95,000. That leaner curve lifts revenue per employee, from about $6,200 now to nearly $11,000 by 2028-29.

The math reflects deeper structural change. Today, 78% of Digitide’s revenue comes from traditional BPO services. That share will fall to 60% by 2029, as data analytics and tech-led platforms grow from 22% to 40%. Geography is changing too: 64% of Digitide’s revenue is still domestic.

In five years, Chahal expects a 50:50 global mix, with more work coming from clients in the US and Middle East. “That alone pushes up realization per employee,” he said.

Digitide already has operations in the Philippines and the Middle East, with new builds underway in Canada and Latin America.

And while AI is increasingly embedded across service lines, Chahal draws a clear distinction: Only 3% of revenue is from fully autonomous workflows—AI leading end-to-end. Another 9% comes from hybrid models where AI guides the work but people still close it out.

The margin impact of those layers, he added, is already visible in client renewals and deal sizes.

AI is the lever making this possible. Routine tasks—data entry, basic support, rote collections—are increasingly handled by software agents like QBuddy and DigiColleqt. Human employees are moving upstream, into client-facing roles, process redesign, and problem-solving.

The classroom in Indore

The shift is also reshaping how Digitide prepares its workforce. The company has embedded an AI-focused curriculum into undergraduate programmes in cities like Indore and Coimbatore. Students who complete the coursework receive a guaranteed interview.

One of those programmes is running in a government college on the outskirts of Indore. Inside a modest classroom with plastic chairs and a dusty whiteboard, final-year students learn how AI tools like QBuddy and DigiColleqt work, not just technically, but in real operational flows. “They’ve never heard of GPT,” said a Digitide trainer. “But they understand field collections. When we show them the AI’s logic, they get it immediately.”

Internally, every employee is expected to complete 52 hours of training annually, with incentives for those who go further.

“We’re not depending on the talent pipeline,” Chahal said. “We’re creating our own through embedded programmes and continuous learning.”

Building the invisible

Digitide is, in many ways, Isaac’s most complex creation—the first time he’s had to build systems that could one day make parts of his own legacy redundant. It’s a bet on software in a company built on staffing. It’s a challenge to incumbents in a sector he once supplied. It’s a reinvention that forces him to reexamine the values that got him here.

“The technology will keep moving,” he said. “But leadership has to move with conscience.”

That, more than anything else, defines what Isaac is trying to build next: a company that understands what it’s breaking, even as it builds something new.

In a country where employment has long meant paperwork, uniforms and a daily punch-in, Isaac is now building something less visible—but no less consequential.