TCS has One of World’s Largest AI-ready Workforces, says CEO

Tata Consultancy Services has built one of the largest and most artificial-intelligenceready workforces in the world, chief executive officer K Krithivasan said in an email to employees at the start of the new fiscal year.

In the email, a copy of which ET has seen, Krithivasan thanked employees for their efforts in learning and skilling themselves on AI. “TCS is currently working over 200 engagements in GenAI with our clients and foresees a promising pipeline of future work across all industries,” said Krithivasan who will complete a year at the helm of TCS in June.

Most TCS employees returning to office in the last quarter also led to greater learning, he said. He also wrote about chief operating officer NG Subramaniam, who is retiring next month, and thanked him for his contribution.

TCSers have clocked 51 million learning hours and acquired 5 million competencies in FY24. Its generative AI pipeline has doubled to $900 million, the IT bellwether said during its earnings announcement. TCS reported last week that its net profit grew 9.1% on-year to ₹12,434 crore in the final quarter of 202324, beating expectations. The strong performance came on the back of increased efficiency, productivity gains and lower subcontracting costs. Revenue increased 3.5% to ₹61,237 crore in the fourth quarter of a year marked by plunging demand for technology services globally due to macroeconomic uncertainty and geopolitical strife.

The Mumbai-headquartered firm said it had signed new deals totalling $13.2 billion in the quarter — the highest ever for the company even as it signalled a cautious turnaround for the industry saying that the pain may be bottoming out and FY25 will be better than FY24.
TCS has, however, said that it is hard to pin-point the quarter in which growth will return.

Talking about the GenAI pipeline in an interview with ET after the results announcement, Krithivasan said

that “the pipeline itself has doubled over the last quarter and has been shaping up quite well. We are training a large set of our workforce, coming up with our own new tools and platforms to help our customers, new use cases on how customers can use the technology.”
On being asked if in the future revenue headcount could be decoupled from growth with the greater focus on Gen AI, he said: “I don’t think there'll be a complete decoupling of effort and revenue. But you may not see immediate linearity every time. Sometimes we may be increasing the headcount in one quarter and the revenue can come up in some other quarters. So, if you want to correlate the headcount and revenue on every quarter, that could become more and more difficult, but at the same time, there won't be complete decoupling.”

While lauding employees’ efforts in learning and skilling in AI and GenAI, Krithivasan said in his email on Monday: “This is another tribute to the culture of engineering we have at TCS, and I am eager to see it grow from strength to strength.”