TCS chairman N Chandrasekaran says company has no layoff plans

TCS chairman N Chandrasekaran made it clear at the company's 31st Annual General Meeting (AGM) that India's largest software company has no layoff plans. He also stressed that the company will continue to hire, but yes, days of massive campus hiring may be over.

"There is no downsizing of staff. That is not planned at all. We just want to have the right talent. We want to use the agents. And we need to attract the best talent, the rate of addition of employees will not be as it used to be. If the HR department of the company had a metric on their ability to hire a large number of talent, that metric will go away," he added. TCS' overall headcount dropped by 23,460 to 5.84 lakh employees in FY2026. He further emphasised that AI is not a threat to software companies but rather one of the biggest opportunities. Calling AI the "biggest opportunity TCS has had so far", he highlighted the financial scale of the technology. Chandrasekaran said that TCS is investing in building AI agents for internal operations, solution frameworks, and client-specific work. The company's employees and the AI agents will work together, and that will be the future, the chairman said.

Chandrasekaran said that the AI world will produce "so much more opportunities" that will require new talent. He stated that the company's AI revenues reached close to $2.5 billion on an annualised basis in the last quarter and predicted that by 2028 to 2030, 100 per cent of the company's revenue will have an AI component. TCS Chairman: Indian IT industry achieved what no one thought is possible Chandrasekaran said that India's technology industry built its global position by doing something many thought it couldn't: Taking powerful new technologies and making them work, reliably and accountably, inside the world's most demanding institutions.

Some say AI poses a fundamental threat to that model. "I see it differently: far from being a mortal threat, AI is the most significant opportunity yet for enterprise IT.

" He added, "In late 2024, Agentic AI systems began to look genuinely ready for enterprise workflows - writing code, testing software, running technology operations. A serious question crystallised: if AI can do this work, what happens to an industry built around doing it? India's Nifty IT index fell more than a third.

Globally, shares in all technology services and platform companies plummeted. And yet, margins have held. Revenues are up. The deal pipeline is stronger than ever. The business fundamentals have held. So, what is going on? I believe the disparity stems from a misconception surrounding the relationship between AI and IT services." "AI tools reduce the need for human input in the building and maintenance of software. However, AI does more than reduce effort. It is not merely a technology. It is infrastructure - an infrastructure of intelligence."