‘TCS will have as many AI agents as employees’

BENGALURU: TCS chairman N Chandrasekaran said the IT industry will no longer hire at the scale seen over the past two decades as artificial intelligence takes over parts of traditional work, signalling a structural shift for India’s $315-billion technology sector. “The company will not be hiring the kind of numbers it used to hire,” Chandrasekaran said at TCS’s 31st annual general meeting held virtually on Tuesday.

He said AI agents would increasingly work alongside employees and could eventually match the size of the human workforce. “The company will have an equal number of AI workers—which we call AI agents—as there are employees. If the company has half a million employees, the day is not far when the company will have half a million AI agents,” he said.

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The remarks come as India’s IT services industry grapples with the implications of GenAI automating parts of software development including testing and application maintenance—functions that have historically fuelled large-scale hiring by Indian IT firms.

Chandrasekaran, however, rejected the premise that AI would diminish the industry’s long-term prospects. “That does not mean there are no future opportunities. Once the transition happens, the AI world will produce many more opportunities. There will be new talent that will be required,” he said. “Some of the work being done today will go to AI agents. That will be the nature of the transition that we have to go through not only as a company, but as an industry and as a country. We need to build a lot of AI skills so people can be gainfully employed.”

The comments come at a time when investors are questioning the future of IT services in an AI-driven world. The concern has weighed heavily on technology stocks. “India’s Nifty IT index fell more than a third. Globally, shares in technology services and platform companies plummeted,” he said. Yet, the industry’s operating performance tells a different story. “Margins have held. Revenues are up. The deal pipeline is stronger than ever. The business fundamentals have held.”

According to Chandrasekaran, investors are misreading the relationship between AI and IT services. “AI does more than reduce effort. It is an infrastructure of intelligence,” he said.

“Far from being a mortal threat, AI is the most significant opportunity yet for enterprise IT,” he added.

He identified five major growth areas for IT services firms: modernising legacy technology systems, redesigning business processes around AI, governing AI agents, building sovereign AI infrastructure, and deploying AI in physical environments such as factories, warehouses and supply chains.

Paytm to hire 4,000 even as it cuts jobs

Paytm plans to hire about 4,000 employees over the next nine months as it expands its merchant network and accelerates investments in artificial intelligence, according to a Bloomberg report. The recruitment drive, running through March next year, will focus on product, technology, AI and leadership roles. The company has already added more than 800 employees over the past two months, Bloomberg reported, citing a company statement. At the same time, Paytm will trim about 1% of its workforce after the current appraisal cycle, affecting roughly 400 employees based on its current headcount of around 40,000.
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