Infosys is planning to move between 25% and 33% of its more than 320,000 employees into specialist roles as artificial intelligence reshapes India’s IT services industry, according to a report by The Economic Times.
The Bengaluru-headquartered company also plans to build a team of about 6,000 “frontier engineers” to support advanced technology and AI-driven client projects. The plans were briefed to partners, advisers and analysts at Infosys’s three-day annual Americas Confluence in Washington, DC last week, the ET report said, citing people who attended.
If executed at the upper end, the shift would move around 105,000 employees out of traditional generalist IT positions and into deeper technical or domain-specialist tracks. Specialist positions are expected to focus on AI, data, advanced engineering and clients’ industry domains.
Infosys is also hiring specialised engineering talent from top Indian institutes and US campuses, often competing with dedicated AI labs for the same pool. A presentation by an Infosys executive at the Washington event showed that 270,000 employees have received AI training and 80,000 are working on coding tools.
The company has been building an AI-ready workforce for two years. It uses internal categories such as AI “builders” and AI “masters” and had trained more than 275,000 employees in AI and generative AI as of June 2025, based on figures Infosys disclosed at the time.
The frontier engineering ambition was first outlined publicly by CEO Salil Parekh in July, at the company’s Q1 FY27 post-earnings press conference: “We are building a team of frontier engineers to support our client work. Our plan is to have 6,000 Frontier Engineers over the next few years.”
In the same call, Parekh described AI-led revenue as 8% of Infosys’s overall business. Infosys has not officially confirmed the reported 25% to 33% specialist workforce shift. The proposed reshape mirrors moves across India’s $280-billion IT services sector, where TCS, Wipro and HCLTech are also reallocating headcount, hiring plans and training budgets around AI delivery.
