Fortune India Exclusive: Why Mohit Joshi of Tech Mahindra feels the H-1B issue is contextual not existential

When Mohit Joshi took charge as the CEO & MD of Tech Mahindra in 2023, after CP Gurnani stepped down, he inherited a company at the cross-roads of multiple transformations. Client spending was slowing after the initial post-Covid surge, artificial intelligence (AI) was redrawing the contours of IT services.

Today, with AI redrawing the contours of IT services, coupled with geopolitics emerging as the 800-pound gorilla in corporate boardrooms, Joshi, who completes two years at the helm, finds himself in the midst of a disruptive wave. rising costs and restrictions on H-1B visas, the workhorse of the Indian IT industry’s global delivery model.

The U.S. administration recently turned on the immigration screws by hiking H-1B visa fees multi-fold to $100,000 from the current $2,000 and $5,000. The development has cast a shadow on the Street, with IT stocks losing over $9 billion (Rs 85000 crore) in market capitalisation since the announcement on September 21.

The fifth largest IT services company by revenue has seen close to Rs 8,000 crore of its mcap being shaved off over the past week, with the stock coming off nearly 6%.

Joshi, however, is far from rattled. Having witnessed cycles of crises and recoveries since the turn of the millennium, he views the latest visa storm as part of the familiar turbulence that has come to define the technology services business.

“This industry is never short of drama,” Joshi says with a shrug. “I’ve been in this industry lived through the Y2K era, seen the dotcom boom-bust cycle. Followed by the global financial crisis, then Covid and now geopolitical disruptions. Since the industry [Indian IT services] is global, you do feel the impact if something goes wrong or something changes in any part of the world, particularly in the US,” elaborates Joshi in an exclusive interaction with Fortune India.

Like a true leader, for Joshi, disruption is not an aberration but the very essence of how the tech industry has grown. “If you don't like excitement, you should stay away from this industry anyway, because unlike something which is slower moving like consumer goods or something, in this industry, there's always a huge amount of change in every couple of years,” says Joshi, whose company ended FY25 with close to Rs 53,000 crore in consolidated revenues.

Fears overdone?

For decades, the H-1B program has been vital for the growth of Indian IT companies, which used it to deploy engineers onsite for clients in the US. While critics in Washinton accused firms of abusing the system to undercut local wages, s majority believe that the arrangement has help the US to keep its innovation engine running and helped tech forms to maintain their edge.

Joshi though insists the impact of the visa hike is more muted than what the headlines suggest. “First, I'll just say that we should all see this in perspective,” he says.

He draws a comparison from outside the tech world. “My brother works in the government exports industry. The government exports industry has been massively hit by the increase in tariffs. And so that is a here and now impact, right? From what we're talking about H-1B perspective is really an impact for the future,” says Joshi.

For Tech Mahindra in particular, the numbers tell a different story. “We around 150,000 employees, of which less than 1% is on an H-1B. So that gives you a sense of the scale of the problem as far as we are concerned,” says Joshi, over a call from London.

From dependency to diversification

It wasn’t always this way. In the early 2000s, Indian IT companies were far more dependent on visas to keep business humming in the U.S. “If you go back to this industry, maybe 20 years ago, maybe 80-90% of the revenue was coming from the US and you had 30-40% people on site, and almost everybody was on an H-1B,” Joshi recalls.

But over the years, this dependence has fallen. The shrinking reliance on H-1B visas, Joshi emphasizes, is not unique to Tech Mahindra but reflects a broader industry trend. He notes that only about 1.5% of employees across the IT services sector are on H-1Bs, a relatively small share. Of the roughly 400,000 H-1B visa holders currently in the U.S., less than a quarter work in IT services, with the majority employed in areas such as banking, healthcare, and education.

This data flips the narrative that Indian IT firms are disproportionately exposed. For Joshi, the transformation reflects years of deliberate diversification. Tech Mahindra’s U.S. revenue is significant at 45%, but the company has hedged its bets with a global footprint.

Part of why Joshi is confident about the H-1B issue settling down is the reality of competition. If the U.S. makes it harder for companies to bring in talent, others stand ready to welcome it.

Canada has already positioned itself as a destination for high-skilled immigrants, launching fast-track visa programs for tech workers. European countries, too, are opening their doors as they grapple with talent shortages in AI, cybersecurity, and software engineering.

Indian IT firms have hedged their strategies accordingly, expanding nearshore centers in Canada, Mexico, Poland, and Romania. For Tech Mahindra, such centres not only reduce reliance on visas but also align with clients’ preference for talent in similar time zones.

Much of this resilience stems from the evolution of the delivery model itself. Where once the industry’s fortunes rested on flying engineers across borders, today distributed delivery is the norm.

“I think you will always need an onsite workforce, right? You'll always need an onsite workforce,” Joshi says. “But I feel that maybe that will consist largely of people that you hire locally and maybe you will have those people spending maybe more time in India, understanding how the model works,” explains Joshi.

Two decades ago, the consulting landscape was starkly divided. Firms such as Accenture, Capgemini, and several smaller players that have since been acquired were built almost entirely on onsite consulting. By contrast, companies such as Infosys and Tech Mahindra pioneered the blended onsite–offshore model that later became the industry norm.

That distinction has since blurred. Joshi points out that Accenture today actually employs more people in India than Tech Mahindra itself. The model, he explains, has evolved into one where onsite presence remains essential, but the workforce is increasingly drawn from local hires, with distributed delivery gaining broad acceptance among clients. The shift, he stresses, does not mean onsite staff will disappear altogether but rather the mix has permanently changed.

Bigger Worries Than Visas

If Joshi appears relatively restrained when discussing immigration, it is because he sees far bigger priorities on the horizon. For him, the existential test for IT services lies not in visas but in technology itself. The real challenge, he argues, is how companies adapt to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence by reshaping service offerings, embedding AI into delivery, and using it to unlock productivity. As he puts it: “I feel that the bigger challenge with the industry over the past couple of years has been how do you make sure you keep moving up the curve because of AI and how do you make your service offerings much more AI oriented? How do you use AI to drive productivity? That is one set of challenges.”

The other, he says, is growth itself. “The other set of challenges has frankly been the fact that growth has been lower, right? Growth has been slower because you had those couple of years of Covid where you had a certain burst in terms of tech spend. And now there is indecision because people don't know which way the technology will go. But once I feel people get comfortable with the fact that to really get the benefit of AI, you need to be able to simplify and modernise your systems, then the spend will come back,” believes Joshi.

What keeps him up at night, then, is not visas but relevance. “I feel that the stress or the challenges in the industry that I spend most of my time worrying about is how do we make sure that our service offerings are up to par? How do we make sure we're building a world class learning organisation?” says Joshi.

It may well turn out that the H-1B debate is just another day in an event-punctuated tech landscape. “The reality is that over time, whether it is by building out a brand or improving your offer in the US or by being better known, the reliance on H-1Bs has gone down, not just for us, but for the industry as a whole,” feels Joshi.

And given Joshi’s eventful journey in IT, he could well be betting the curtains will fall on the visa drama sooner than later.