Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is beginning to shoulder a larger share of the infrastructure costs involved in deploying artificial intelligence solutions, signalling a shift in how IT services companies are commercialising enterprise AI.While customers initially bore most of the AI model and inference costs, the company is now making upfront investments through partnerships with frontier AI providers and managing AI infrastructure as part of its offerings, Chief Financial Officer Samir Seksaria said.“Initially it starts with the client bearing the cost but increasingly we are having it at our end as well. We have invested into a lot of frontier models through partnerships. We are doing pre-buy commits and an end-to-end overall management of the AI-related work. So, it is a combination right now,” said Seksaria.In the latest quarter, TCS reported more cautious investments from clients of particular veritcals like consumer business, owing to geopolitical headwind and inflation. However, the company continues to count on longstanding verticals such as banking financial services, tech services and regional markets. So much so that the company remains bullish on its margin aspiration of 26 per cent.“We drive our projects, teams to get closer to 26 per cent. We have demonstrated in the past 3-4 years also that we can get to 26 per cent, make the right investments, required for long-term goals,” said Seksaria.For now, the company makes growth investments necessary to derive long-term value while managing efficiency levers, operating leverage. Particularly, it talked about huge headroom in AI projects where almost every customer’s business value chain has to be reimagined to truly deliver the full potential of the technology.“We see scope in terms of continually pushing the levers. In fact, these investments also should lead to productivity improvement, which then we can reinvest back into the business,” said Seksaria.The AI usage has shaped the company’s HR policy as well. TCS has enough agents to deliver better productivity, experience, value to customers. In line with the aspiration to become the world’s largest AI tech services company, the company is encouraging every one of its people to build agents, leverage the same and augment themselves.“When we are going to the campuses and hiring, some of the talent that we are bringing are very naturally AI. They are able to very comfortably use this to augment themselves and deliver. That is what we are trying to build on and scale,” said Sudeep Kunnumal, Chief Human Resources Officer at TCS.Published on July 13, 2026