Tata Consultancy Services plans to build a team of up to 8,900 forward-deployed AI engineers and is looking for acquisition targets in AI and cybersecurity, chief executive K Krithivasan said.
The move is India’s largest IT firm answering the question that has hung over the sector since the arrival of agentic AI in enterprise stacks, which is whether the industry that sells engineering hours has anything left to sell.
Krithivasan said TCS aims to convert between 1% and 1.5% of its associate base into forward-deployed engineers. Against a headcount of 593,798 at the end of June, that works out at roughly 5,900 to 8,900 people.
The term is borrowed from the AI labs, where forward-deployed engineers sit inside the client’s business and make the model actually do something. Chief operating officer Aarthi Subramanian described them as specialists who are multi-skilled but deep in one particular area, which is a polite way of saying they are the people sent in when the pilot does not survive contact with production.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!Krithivasan has framed the programme as evidence that AI creates jobs rather than destroys them. He did not say whether the engineers will be hired externally or retrained from within, and on a base of nearly 600,000 people, that distinction is the whole story.
