Tata Consultancy Services' Chief Operating Officer Aarthi Subramanian said the growing debate around token cost versus human cost in AI deployments is a false choice, arguing that enterprises are not trading one for the other as artificial intelligence adoption scales.
Speaking after the company's June quarter results, Subramanian said token cost has become a dominant theme in client conversations as generative AI and agentic AI workloads move into production together, bringing reasoning capability and workflow redesign into sharper focus. "That whole token cost of AI is a top conversation with customers," she said, adding that governing this cost has become a priority for enterprises and technology partners alike.
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Pushing back on the framing that rising AI costs come at the expense of human capital, Subramanian said the two were not competing for the same budget. "I don't think this is a zero some game on token cost plus tech human cost," she said, arguing that as clients extract more value from AI, overall technology spending will rise rather than shrink.
Subramanian said the choice of AI model is increasingly being dictated by the nature of the workload rather than made on an ad hoc basis, a shift she compared to disciplines such as FinOps that emerged during the cloud computing wave. She said TCS and the wider industry were now building similar governance frameworks, sometimes described as AI Ops, to manage cost and control as adoption scales.
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She also flagged that the rise of AI coding assistants had not diminished the importance of core technical skills within delivery teams, and that strong engineering fundamentals remain essential even as automation tools speed up development work.
On the broader AI opportunity, Subramanian said TCS's AI revenue rose to $2.6 billion in the quarter from $2.3 billion previously, though she cautioned that such projects tend to be short-cycle and discretionary in nature, requiring continuous new wins rather than annuity-style repeat business. Deal wins this quarter spanned business process operations, HR, finance and customer experience functions, alongside a mega deal with SKF covering AI-led IT operations and enterprise transformation.
Subramanian said TCS's decades of presence in client environments gave it an advantage in helping enterprises navigate the AI transition, describing the ability to embed technology into live business operations as work that requires deep contextual grounding built over time.
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