Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has launched India’s first lights-out factory lab at its Sahyadri Park campus in Pune, a facility built to advance AI-led manufacturing. The company announced the launch on Wednesday through a regulatory filing, describing the setup as the country’s maiden lights-out factory lab.
The facility is named the TCS Industrial Autonomy & Engineering Lab – Lights-Out Factory. A lights-out factory is a manufacturing unit where autonomous systems run production lines with minimal human intervention. The Pune lab houses a fully robotic battery pack assembly line, which TCS says makes it India’s first lab to demonstrate lights-out manufacturing in practice.
The lab combines digital twins, robotics, industrial AI, factory control systems, and real-time operational intelligence in a single live environment. The multi-stage setup lets manufacturers prototype, validate, and scale AI-first production systems while cutting the risks that come with real-world deployment. It supports use cases including predictive maintenance, automated quality inspection, real-time process optimisation, human-machine collaboration, and autonomous factory operations.
TCS framed the lab around a specific problem its clients face: turning Industry 4.0, AI, and robotics concepts into working operating models. The company said the Pune facility gives customers a controlled setting to test industrial scenarios and gauge their fit for production before committing to full rollout.
“When we think of a manufacturing facility, we picture legacy factories and heavy equipment, that run on intense manual effort. At TCS, we are reimagining those environments and building factories for the future,” said Sreenivasa Chakravarti, Global Head and Vice President of Industrial Autonomy and Engineering at TCS. He added that the lab shows how a “Human + AI” model can help enterprises move from digitally enabled operations toward increasingly autonomous production.
The Pune lab is the latest addition to TCS’s industrial autonomy footprint. Earlier in 2026, the company opened the TCS Industrial Autonomy & Engineering Lab Powered by NVIDIA in Bengaluru, aimed at physical-AI innovation for industrial and mobility applications. TCS employs more than 5.84 lakh people globally and runs facilities across Maharashtra, including Pune, Mumbai, and Nashik.
Industrial partners have weighed in on the launch. Joakim Landholm, SVP Commercial & Operations Development at bearings maker SKF, said the next wave of manufacturing will depend on smarter, more energy-efficient, and more reliable operations.
“We see TCS Industrial Autonomy & Engineering Lab – Lights-Out Factory as an important step in helping industry translate advanced automation and industrial AI into measurable operational value,” Landholm said.
The lab’s five capability areas span autonomous factory concepts, digital twin and simulation environments, vision AI and robotics, sensor-to-cloud industrial intelligence, and software-defined engineering. For India’s manufacturing and IT-services sectors, the launch adds to a run of physical-infrastructure investments by domestic technology firms, and it signals where TCS is placing its engineering and operations bets as clients test how far autonomous production can go.
