Former Tech Mahindra Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Chander Prakash Gurnani has added his two cents about Tata Consultancy Services’ (TCS) decision to lay off over 12,000 employees in FY26.
“The focus on the Sholay dialogue ‘Kitne aadmi the’ or judging the Indian IT industry based on headcount, thank god that period will be over,” Gurnani told CNBC-TV18. “All of us will have to rewire ourselves to start looking at output and outcome-based business models, outcome-based pricing, and look at what it does for business and customers, instead of looking at IT and systems in isolation.”
“I am actually quite excited because we, as in the Indian IT industry, have a chance to prove that we will build platforms and accelerate innovation, and we will rule the world focusing on the application cycle,” Gurnani added.
After TCS broke the news of the upcoming layoffs, many questioned whether this was a result of artificial intelligence (AI). TCS CEO K Krithivasan has rejected this claim summarily. Gurnani, too, stated that the idea of AI cutting down jobs was inaccurate, claiming that the new technology will only bring about more opportunities.
“If you see the job openings at these companies, they have only increased since the previous year. This is because they need more AI engineers, more data scientists, prompt engineers and people who can collapse a few functions of an organisation,” Gurnani explained.
TCS’ decision to fire 2% of its workforce, which will mostly affect those in the middle and the senior levels, has become the talk of the hour. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is seemingly keeping an eye on the situation as it develops further.