BENGALURU: About 50% of IT services company Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) lateral hires are coming in with high-end skills, including Artificial Intelligence/ Gen AI and others.
Milind Lakkad, Chief HR Officer of TCS, said this during the fourth quarter earnings call. "If you look at our trainee intake, the percentage of hires we have in digital is 40% compared to 17% last year," he added.
The company has been seeing significant adoption of data and AI initiatives. In the fourth quarter, AI, GenAI, data and cloud IoT, DE and enterprise solutions drove strong client engagements and growth for the company.
"Our pipeline of AI, GenAI engagement is higher than in the last few quarters, and we saw a significant increase in deal wins across AI for IT and AI for business," TCS CEO K Krithivasan said.
He added that in FY25, there was a noticeable shift in the cloud market with significant growth in sovereign cloud requirements, AI infrastructure investments and accelerated legacy modernization.
"Data modernization has paved the way for more AI and GenAI in business activities. There is an increasing demand for GenAI use cases in the areas of contracts management and sales campaign content creation. The propensity to roll out more GenAI use cases to production is increasing, and the organisational barriers witnessed earlier were diminishing," he added.
Wipro, Infosys, LTIMindtree and HCLTech have been training their employees on specialised AI skill-sets. HDFC Securities, in its IT sector preview, recently said the deal activity will be centred more around cost optimization/takeout initiatives.
"GenAI is taking centre stage but also driving pricing changes as enterprises and hyperscalers integrate AI efficiency into their pricing models."
Nutanix, in its Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, reveals that 52% of enterprises plan to invest in IT training, and 48% are looking to hire new talent to support Gen AI.