Tata Consultancy Services, the company that helped define the modern IT outsourcing industry, is fundamentally rethinking what its workforce looks like. At its annual general meeting on June 9, TCS Chairman N Chandrasekaran laid out a goal that would have sounded like science fiction a few years ago: within three years, TCS wants the number of AI agents operating inside the company to equal its human headcount.
For a firm that employed roughly 613,000 people as of mid-2025, that is not a small number of AI agents.
The numbers behind the shift
TCS has already been trimming its workforce before the AI-agent target was even announced. In the most recent fiscal year (FY26), the company saw a net reduction of over 23,000 employees. That followed a workforce cut of around 12,000 jobs back in July 2025.
TCS leadership is framing these cuts not as an AI story but as a skills-mismatch story. CEO K Krithivasan has said the layoffs were driven by employees whose capabilities didn’t align with the company’s evolving needs, not by robots replacing humans at their desks.
