Subramanyan, who is the COO of the company. Kiti, thank you very much for joining us on ET Now. Let me start off with where we left in Q1. When we met in Q1, you said you needed some more time to see whether the cloud clears, and the uncertainty was there in the entire environment. As we look at the future, maybe next six months or a year, do you think that now much more clarity has come in with respect to demand, with respect to how clients are investing?
The macro significantly has not changed compared to where we left in Q1. But the kind of discussions we have, and what our teams, the sentiments our teams tell us, what we find is previously we talked about project cancellations and deferments, and all that has decreased. So that gives us a confidence that maybe slowly things could improve.
AI demand, has it gone up in the last quarter as compared to maybe six months ago?
See, if you really look at it, let me speak from a Q2 perspective. So when you look at Q2, I think definitely the demand has been, we've seen an upside. And speaking from a service lines perspective, we have seen good robust growth across all our service lines. And every service line has grown this quarter, so whether it's cloud, whether it's enterprise transformation, AI, data, so all these offerings are all part of the customers' enterprise transformation programs. So all of them have seen good uptake this year. Most geographies also, except for UK, excepting UK and excepting consumer business as a vertical, we have seen a positive growth in all geographies as well as business verticals.
There's a transformation also in play for you, right? I mean AI services tech company going forward, and you invested majorly in that over the next couple of years. Take us through that journey which is there. And why, my understanding is that your workforce is anyways AI-enabled in that sense, 1.6 lakh employees are AI-enabled. Now this AI tech services company, how will it differ from a normal services company?
See, you actually started off at the right point, Sajit. You talked about 1.6 lakh. So we've been training our workforce. We've been investing a lot in building platforms, creating infrastructure for training, building solutions, and a number of things. And talking to our customers, helping them in scaling. So all these things put together, and we also enhanced our leadership team. Arti came in, Mangesh came in, we announced a new leader for AI. So when we put all these pieces together, and the kind of work we are doing with our customers, the kind of discussions we've had with our customers, we realized with all the different puzzle pieces coming together, we should become the largest AI-led services company. So then what we looked at is if we have to really reach what I would call our rightful place, there are five things we need to do. One is internal transformation, essentially about training our people, building our own internal processes, everything should be AI. Second is transforming all the services we deliver to our customers. Again, all of them, it is just not about having a solution that leverages AI at the time of delivering solutions at their end customer. How do I do ADM? How do I do simple run operations? Everything has to leverage AI. The third is I need to transform our workforce. Fourth is we need to look at how do we change the business process, the value proposition to the customer, their end customer. And last is we thought that we have to expand into the adjacencies that we are not being part of, and we should expand that scope. So data centers, we also announced an acquisition. So the last one is where it fits. It's not that we just do only the data center acquisition as one thing. We've been starting initiatives in all five. So what you see externally is the data center announcement we make and the listed exchange announcement we made. So that's where it fits in.
If I may just add to what Kiti said, right? If you look at it, this quarter, across these pillars, and we have been working on this, but there is definitely an acceleration across all these efforts. So the first one is TCS internal transformation. So we have been doing this, but this whole focus on building an AI-first culture, we have really taken it to the next level this quarter. We have AI access. We believe that if you are to be an AI practitioner, you need to have access to AI. So we have given AI access to all our employees, 600,000 and plus. Second thing is we've ran and just concluded the world's largest, and I would also say most innovative and diverse hackathon, which brought together 280,000 TCSers in a span of eight weeks. Four weeks of ideate with AI and four weeks of build with AI. 180,000 plus TCSers participated and built solutions during this 8-week event. So all this is part of driving an AI-first culture and making each one of us an AI practitioner. All of us in the leadership team also got hands-on with AI during this time. So that's one part of it. The second part of it, Kiti talked about every service line transforming with AI. We are on a journey to redefine every service line with a human plus AI operating model. What does it mean? What is the art of the possible? Again, that's taking shape, building on what we have and taking it to the next level. Third one is how we take AI to our customers. How do you take AI close to customers and make it real? Again, there we have a rapid build methodology where we are taking an outcome-based approach to delivering AI projects in short cycles, eight weeks, ten weeks, twelve weeks, sixteen weeks. So I think that's being endorsed by our customers extremely well. And then based on the success of those programs, how do you scale those projects and do multiple such projects within the customers? The other important thing we're doing is with AI, how do you convert the hype to something real? So we are engaging with our customers in what we call AI innovation days, really in a day or two, bringing the client teams together, showing the power of what solutions they can build, bringing the rapid build, and really shaping the projects. Because how do you get value out of AI is a big question all of our customers have. So some of these initiatives are really working. So $10 billion of TCV that came in this quarter.
Give me a sense of how much of that order book had AI built into it.
See, Sajit, the way today it works, one of the reasons we said AI-led is almost everything we do today will have an AI component in it. So it's going to be very difficult. In fact, our ambition would be that every project we do has to be AI. Either it'll use AI to drive productivity, AI to deliver speed, or AI will be used to deliver end customer value. So you are going to find it increasingly difficult to find a project that will not have AI.
If you do not embed AI into every interaction, every piece of work that you do with a customer, you need to really do AI-first solutioning in everything we do. So you need to do that to be competitive.
Just a while back you articulated beautifully how you're engaging with your customers, whether it's four weeks, six weeks, or eight-week, ten-week kind of projects. When we talk of this TCV which we are talking about, can you give a breakdown? Are these smaller projects or are they long-lasting projects?
