Actualizing affordances – Story of Indian Information Technology (IT) Industry delivering Artificial Intelligence based solutions

Indian IT industry with its long history in delivering quality customized software solutions is gearing up to provide solutions around emerging technologies such as AI, to its clients. In this study, we attempt to explore this transition through the lens of affordances within the IS literature. We base our findings on a four-month ethnography, where one of us worked as a part of a team providing AI solutions in an IT organization situated in Bengaluru, India. Applying Volkoff and Strong’s critical realist framework to the nature of affordances that are being actualized, we compare work practices and processes in this AI project with traditional software development. Given that these two call for different affordances, our in-situ observations parse the actualization of affordances within the organization. Our findings indicate that affordances associated with traditional software development continue to get actualized as work processes even in the context of AI projects