The bill finally arrived. For eighteen months, Silicon Valley and Dalal Street acted like they’d found a magic money tree rooted in a pile of H100 chips. Every earnings call was a competition to see who could say "generative" the most times without gagging. But the sugar high is wearing off, and the crash is going to be ugly.

US tech stocks spent the last week sliding down a mountain of their own making. It wasn't a sudden collapse. Just a slow, grinding realization that maybe, just maybe, spending $100 billion on hardware to automate the task of writing LinkedIn birthday greetings wasn't the masterstroke investors thought it was. Now, that anxiety is migrating. It’s hopping across the ocean, infecting the ADRs of the world’s biggest back-offices.

Cognizant, Accenture, Wipro. These aren't just names on a ticker; they are the gears of the global economy. And those gears are grinding.

The logic used to be simple. American companies have a problem, they hire Accenture to consult on it, and then they hire a firm like Wipro or Cognizant to throw thousands of engineers at it until the problem goes away or becomes someone else’s department. It was a beautiful, lucrative cycle of labor arbitrage. AI was supposed to make that cycle faster. Instead, it’s making it obsolete.

Investors are finally asking the uncomfortable question: If a junior dev in Bengaluru can be replaced by a prompt, why are we paying for the dev? Or the manager? Or the office space in Pune?

Accenture’s recent performance served as a cooling bucket of water to the face. When the giants stumble, the rest of the line trips. We’re seeing a massive trade-off play out in real-time. Clients are pausing "discretionary spend"—code for "anything that actually requires human thought"—to funnel every spare cent into AI pilots that rarely leave the runway. They’re trading reliable, billable hours for speculative tokens.

It’s a specific kind of friction. You have companies like Cognizant trying to pivot while their existing revenue streams are being cannibalized by the very tech they’re forced to sell. It’s like watching a carpenter sell the client a 3D printer and then wondering why nobody is buying handmade chairs anymore. The ADRs are reflecting that panic. Wipro’s numbers have been shaky for a while, but this isn't just a bad quarter. It’s a crisis of identity.

The "AI-led fear" isn't that the machines are coming for our souls. It’s much more boring and much more damaging. It’s the fear that the ROI on this entire experiment is a myth. We’ve seen this movie before. We saw it with the metaverse. We saw it with the blockchain. But this time, the price tag is astronomical. We’re talking about a capital expenditure cycle that makes the fiber-optic boom of the late 90s look like a lemonade stand.

In the US, the Nasdaq is twitchy. One bad forecast from a chipmaker and the whole house of cards wobbles. But for the Indian IT sector, the stakes are different. These firms aren't selling software; they’re selling people. If the market decides that people are a liability because an LLM can do 60 percent of the job at 1 percent of the cost, the valuation models for these companies don't just need a haircut. They need an autopsy.

The fallout is already visible in the headcount. For the first time in decades, the giants of the subcontinent aren't hiring with the same reckless abandon. They’re "optimizing." They’re "bench-testing." More fragments of a broken promise.

The irony is thick enough to choke on. The very companies that built their empires on the back of the digital revolution are now being told they’re too slow for the next one. They’re being squeezed between Nvidia’s soaring margins and their own clients' shrinking budgets.

So, here we are. The US market is bleeding, the ADRs are sagging, and the "AI revolution" is starting to look like a very expensive way to lose money. The hype cycle is finally meeting the accounting cycle, and the accountants are rarely as optimistic as the evangelists.

Everyone is waiting for the bounce. They’re looking for the sign that the AI investments are actually translating into bottom-line growth rather than just more compute costs and a higher electricity bill. They’re waiting for proof that a chatbot can actually run a business better than a room full of motivated humans in Chennai.

But what if the efficiency gains are just a race to the bottom where nobody actually wins?