At a time of high anxiety surrounding global workforces and the threat of artificial intelligence, the top management of TCS, while speaking to NDTV Profit, has completely dispelled the narrative that AI will decimate IT sector jobs, adding that the company is following a structural shift that will focus on fresh hiring and high-level consulting expertise.
Addressing widespread concerns over AI-driven automation, TCS CEO K. Krithivasan argued that increased productivity will generate new demand rather than eliminate roles.
"We may need less people for doing what you're doing today, but you're going to be doing much more than what you're doing today. So, when you're going to be doing much more—the whole space is expanding significantly.
I said what you're doing today you may get 20% productivity, you may probably do 20% less. But there's so much of additional work that needs to happen—who is going to do it? So, I'm not expecting that we'll need much less people than what we have today," he said.
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His comments come on the back of TCS reducing their headcount by 23,000 in FY26, closing the year at around 5.84 lakh employees. Krithivasan says the recent reductions in headcount were a strategic adjustment, not an AI replacement drive.
"We only said there are certain people who are in a senior to senior management or middle management who will not be able to adapt to the new future-ready or the new models of working, who will be respectfully outplacing or releasing from the organization. So it is nothing—we didn't have a size in mind saying that I need to cut down my organisation by this much," he explained.
Meanwhile, Executive Director – President and Chief Operating Officer, Aarthi Subramanian highlighted a deliberate pivot toward advisory roles.
"The other color to this is that we are also investing in more advisory talent, right? More consulting and advisory type of skills because you want to shift more to the right in terms of how you engage, because with AI, you need to really help them reimagine what they do—their workflows, the process. So we're bringing the higher experts with consulting and advisory skills as well," Subramanian noted.
"We hired more than 44,000 last year and we have already have 25,000 offers which are already given out for this year. That's on the entry-level campus hires. On the experienced professionals, again we hired a significant number last year and based on client demands, we'll continue to onboard the experienced professionals," she concluded.
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