TCS to retrain 1,00,000 employees every year amid AI-driven changes. Here’s what CTO Harrick Vin says
As IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) grapples with changes and challenges arising from artificial intelligence, the IT services giant will retrain around 1,00,000 employees every year, Chief Technology Officer Harrick Vin told Nikkei Asia.
Notably, 1 lakh employees are around one-sixth or 17 percent of the global workforce. The agency said TCS is facing AI-driven challenges in “customer demands and traditional outsourcing model”.
The impact of artificial intelligence is ‘different’ from others, requires reskilling: Vin
The wave of AI-driven technology, particularly generative AI, is “redefine” employee roles and “forces a massive shift” from traditional operating models, Vin said on the sidelines of an Oct. 13 event. He said demand for reskilling had now fallen from less than 30 years.
“Most of the code and software will be generated automatically, so those roles (software engineers) will diminish over time,” Vin said, adding that traditional software testing “will probably disappear.”
“When you’re dealing with self-developing AI solutions, the concept of testing and assurance is completely different. An AI solution may respond differently each time it’s run, so you need ongoing assurance rather than development-time testing. It requires very different roles and a very different set of competencies,” he added.
TCS employees encouraged to use AI tools
According to Vin, TCS will retrain around 1 lakh employees every year and staff are encouraged to use AI tools and participate in hackathons to develop hands-on skills.
“This is not an easy problem. Every organization will need to do this,” he added.
TCS laid off 12,000 people, or 2 per cent of its workforce, in July, aiming to become a “future-ready organisation” by March 2026, the report said. The report added that the company reduced headcount by around 20,000 in the last quarter, taking the total headcount to 5,93,000.
He added that the tech giant is “directing” investments into emerging technology, new markets and large-scale AI deployments.
Vin says long-term outlook for AI is positive
Despite the disruption, Vin thinks productive AI will be “a boon” for the broader IT services sector. Rather than AI replacing humans, he said, the company is embracing tools that “augment” human judgment.
As an example, he pointed out TCS’s collaborations with pharmaceutical companies to develop a cancer drug; here, artificial intelligence was used to identify candidate molecules, reducing the search process from the typical two years to eight weeks.
“We are seeing the boundaries of what is possible advancing very rapidly,” he added.
