Welcome back. You're watching our coverage here from Davos 2026. I'm Shireen Bhan and a company that has the ambition of becoming the world's largest AI services tech company, TCS. That's the message that it is signaling to the world here in Davos. Joining us now to talk about that ambition and its plans going forward is the man in charge, K. Krithivasan. Kriti, always a pleasure. Many thanks for joining us here in a very cold Davos. But you know, let me start by asking you, Kriti, and the question everyone's asking is that is there a shift that's now taking place internally to speed up your ambition but more importantly your aggression? And I'll back this on two data points: you know, the $700 million deal, that acquisition that you did, as well as the deal that you did with TPG. Is that an indication? Is that a sign of your animal spirits coming to life?
Definitely, Shireen. First of all, good morning or good evening to all your ears. It's definitely what we like you said, about four or five months ago we relooked at what should be our destiny in this. We said we have to be the world's largest AI-led services company and then we have to back it up with certain actions. And we defined five pillars towards that. One obviously is how do we transform ourselves internally, how do we transform the services, how do we transform what we do for our customers, and the fifth pillar is how do we broaden our scope in the overall ecosystem. So that's where our interest in both building capability at speed and scale through mergers and acquisitions and also expanding the play with the AI data center by which we are able to provide end-to-end capability to our customers. That's what we call infrastructure to intelligence. To our customers, we can provide service them across all layers of a pro. Okay, we have offerings to them in front if they want infrastructure, if they want hardware design, if they want model as a service, if they want agentic capability or experience, right? So we can provide end to end. So that's the underlying philosophy through which we are approaching it, and that's what you're seeing in some of the initial actions that we have taken.
You know, so this ambition of positioning yourself as the world's largest AI tech services company, I mean who is currently the largest and who do you displace to become the world's largest? I mean what does this mean exactly?
See, like see, I don't want, I don't know who is the largest but everybody is at it and everybody is trying to be a pioneer. But we believe that setting a goal post and vision for us will drive us every day. And more importantly, if you look at compared to year before, like last year there was still a lot of people wondering where is AI going, is it delivering real business benefit, and this year there's a very
Distinct. I'm just trying to understand when you talk about the world's largest, what is the metric? You know, it's clearly not going to be people, revenue. I mean what are we talking about?
This is the question. See, we define five pillars. Within five pillars there are a number of sub activities or subtasks we have defined for ourselves. So we'll keep measuring at each one of them for our internal purpose. But first time, last quarter we also declared what is our AI revenue. Okay, so we continue to measure our AI revenue, how it grows. So all of them put together, like number of people, revenue, the partnerships we have, how are the analysts positioning us in this game, it'll be a composite metric.
You know, there's a debate on whether or not companies should actually report AI revenue since everybody now says everything is AI. So whether it makes any sense to give a separate AI revenue line or not, people like Accenture not doing it anymore.
See, there are two dimensions. Everything is AI for us also, it's true. Like whether we do application development or whether we do business process outsourcing, there is an element of AI. But there's also an element of AI involved. Like if I'm reimagining the claims processing of my customer insurance claim processing, how am I reimagining it using AI? Okay, there are things that cannot be done without AI. So there are things for instance, we are doing a large migration from a mainframe to modern technology. Such things cannot be done without AI. So we have defined specific guardrails on what we would call as AI revenue and we'll stay disciplined and we are going to be reporting that revenue. And of course we are also training. Last quarter we trained almost, we conducted a hackathon that involved about close to 300,000 associates over a 4-week period. All of them were humans, they gave ideas and then they built one of the largest in the world. So there are multiple things happening and every one of them will take us towards the direction of being the world's largest.
Uh, you know, let's understand also what this means in terms of new bets. Because as you pointed out, whether it was the acquisition, $700 million acquisition that you did, or the deal that you did with TPG, what can we expect on both those fronts? More deals like that likely for you?
Definitely, we are looking at where are the areas where we want to build capabilities, as I said, at speed. And with that, we have lined up a number of opportunities. We are looking at, as they materialize, you will hear. But it's not that I'm going to be announcing 10 of them next quarter or anything. But we are looking at a number of opportunities. But definitely we are more acquisitive than before.
More acquisitive than before. So how much could inorganic growth then provide a bump up as?
We are not looking at sharing. Like we are not, as I said, looking at inorganic growth as a revenue driver. Inorganic growth, as I said, is the ability to build the capability at speed and scale. But the revenue driver will be the synergy that we build. How are we able to leverage the larger TCS ecosystem and use the capability that we acquire to deliver benefits to our customer? We are not acquiring to increase our revenue.
Okay. Not acquiring to increase your revenue. But let's talk a little bit about associates because you've seen a fairly significant headcount reduction of 30,000 that you've already announced. Now what are we given to understand? Could your workforce potentially look like going forward as you accelerate your ambition for growth?
Again, one, we've been reiterating this: AI is not taking away the jobs at this time. We are continuing to find, we are in fact, you look at what we are doing in the market. As much as you see our headcount reduced by previous quarter, it went down I think by 20 and now by 10. But otherwise, you've been hiring a lot in the market. And we also announced in the market that we want to have a future-ready workforce. We provide all the ability and the support for our associates to learn and become proficient in these new technologies. There are few associates where we find like they may not be fit or ready for the future that we are charting for ourselves. We are providing them all the support and they're releasing some of them. But otherwise, we continue to hire from the colleges, we continue to hire from the market. We are not stopping hiring. So as I said, at this time we are not looking at shrinking our workforce at all.
