Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) onboarded 14,000 freshers and added 9,279 employees on a net basis during the first quarter of FY27, its strongest quarterly headcount addition in four years. The company’s total workforce stood at 593,798 as of June 30, 2026, up from 584,519 at the end of the previous quarter.
The hiring numbers were announced alongside TCS’s Q1 FY27 earnings on July 9. The company reported consolidated net profit of ₹13,349 crore, up 4.6% year-on-year, and revenue of ₹72,275 crore, up 13.9% from the same quarter last year. TCS’s AI business scaled to a $2.6 billion annualised revenue run rate during the quarter, and the company disclosed a $9.5 billion order book, including an AI-led transformation deal with SKF worth roughly $800 million. Attrition over the trailing twelve months held at 13.6%.
CEO and Managing Director K Krithivasan used the earnings call to push back on concerns that AI adoption would shrink the company’s workforce. “We do not believe that there will be drastic change in headcount,” he said, adding that employees would instead move into roles such as prompt engineering, model training, and AI lifecycle management as client work evolves. He also rejected the broader premise that AI would cut into white-collar employment industry-wide, saying TCS continues to hire whenever it sees demand it can deploy people against.
The Q1 hiring push follows several quarters in which TCS’s overall headcount had been shrinking even as fresher recruitment continued. The company’s workforce fell by 23,460 over the course of FY26, a decline that its HR leadership had previously attributed only in part to a restructuring exercise. Krithivasan’s comments this quarter mark a shift in tone, with the company now pointing to renewed net additions rather than managing a decline.
CHRO Sudeep Kunnumal said the quarter also saw annual wage hikes rolled out for all associates globally, alongside work to align salary structures with the new India Labour Code requirements. Campus hiring, he noted, remains focused on digital and AI-native talent, backed by what the company describes as a reimagined initial learning programme and a stronger AI-centric curriculum.
TCS’s comments build on remarks made last month by Chairman N Chandrasekaran, who said AI agents operating within TCS could eventually match the company’s own employee count, and that AI is expected to contribute close to 100% of the company’s revenue between 2028 and 2030. Krithivasan’s remarks this quarter appear designed to separate that AI ambition from any expectation of workforce reduction, framing the shift instead around reskilling.
TCS did not comment on its overall fresher hiring target for FY27. The company had onboarded 44,000 trainees in FY26, and CEO Krithivasan said earlier this year that future graduate hiring would depend on how business demand develops through the year.
