Davos 2025: TCS chief Krithivasan says AI may create more jobs, not take them

While the debate around artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on jobs continues, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) CEO K Krithivasan thinks there is a real possibility that his company may have to increase its headcount to be able to take on the workload created by this new technology.

However, Krithivasan said hiring for these new roles will not happen in a vacuum — it is incumbent on applicants or those entering the job market to have the right set of skills.

“[The] workforce will have to develop new skills to adapt to AI. We may end up having more people, instead of seeing a reduction in workforce, due to the quantum of work increasing with GenAI,” Krithivasan told CNBC-TV18 on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, on January 21.

Krithivasan believes organisations need to adapt continuously to be successful, and hence, the role of programmers will evolve with Gen AI becoming more mainstream. The number of people TCS needs will not come down due to Gen AI, he added.

His remarks come days after TCS reported a net decline of 5,370 employees in the October-to-December 2024 quarter, taking the total headcount to 607,354 in Q3. The net decrease in number of employees in Q3 was after two consecutive quarters of addition. The firm, however, said that it was on track to hire 40,000 campus trainees this fiscal and even more the next financial year.

Meanwhile, reiterating what he told CNBC-TV18 at Davos in 2024, the TCS CEO said he wanted to re-emphasise the engineering culture at TCS, India’s largest IT services firm both by market cap and the number of employees.

Noting that the company’s focus for 2025 is growth with small tweaks instead of big changes, Krithivasan said building on TCS’ intellectual property (IP) will remain a key focus area and that he doesn’t see a big change in the broader IT services business model due to AI.

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Talking to CNBC-TV18 in Davos, Francisco D’Souza, Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Recognize, also said that with the IT services industry evolving, companies must move beyond the traditional model of providing skilled personnel to creating  IP.

“IT services firms of the future are the ones that are going to be willing and able to invest in creating specialisation, and that specialisation is going to come from investments in intellectual property,” he said.