Hiring at India’s Big Four outsourcers stalls, as AI seemingly makes an impact
- Reference: 1768799034
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/01/19/hcl_infosys_tcs_wipro_results/
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The four companies have all announced quarterly results in the last ten days and appear to be in decent health. HCL reported $3.8 billion revenue, up 7.4 percent year over year. Infosys pulled in $5.1 billion, up 1.7 percent year over year. TCS revenue of $7.5 billion represented a three percent increase. Wipro’s $2.6 billion revenue represented a 5.5 percent year over year improvement.
India’s top tech companies often hire more than 10,000 people a quarter, a rate of recruitment that more-than offsets attrition and sees their headcounts rise substantially. Wipro increased its payroll by 6,500 people last quarter and Infosys hired 5,000 more – muted growth by their standards – while TCS and HCL went backward by 11,000 and 261 people respectively.
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Over the last year, the four companies added just 3,910 staff, an unusually slow rate of hiring.
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Perhaps coincidentally, all four companies told investors they’re using more AI to deliver services for clients, either by adopting the technology to streamline their own work or by adding it to the tools they deliver to customers. Infosys has gone meta with its efforts, by creating a tool that uses AI to create Global Capability Centers, the company’s term for offshored and/or outsourced operations it runs for clients in India, that use AI to improve customers’ operations.
[3]India's major IT outsourcers slow hiring and fret about deal pipelines
[4]70-hour work weeks no longer enough for Infosys founder, who praises China’s 996 culture
[5]India’s services giants brace for impact as US tariffs bite their customers
[6]Marks & Spencer swaps out TCS for fresh helpdesk deal
All also report that clients are hungry for AI expertise, so they can put the technology to work streamlining their operations. As you would expect, on earnings calls the outsourcers’ execs reached for metrics to describe their success with AI. For HCL that was pointing to 60 of its priority customers adopting one of its AI services. At TCS, the trophy win was using AI to accelerate the pace of software builds for a major client. Wipro is chuffed about the rate of adoption for its AI-infused operations tools WINGS and WEGA.
The four companies are all hiring people with AI skills as fast as they can find them while also training senior staff who are yet to wrap their heads around the tech, a new twist on the services industry’s balancing act of trying to keep margins high by having inexperienced and low-salaried juniors handle much client work after high-cost seniors lead with consultancy.
Investors weren’t spooked by what they heard, with the four companies’ share prices steady – other than Infosys, which popped five percent. ®
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[3] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/05/hcl_infosys_tcs_wipro_results/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/24/asia_tech_news_roundup/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/infosys_tcs_wipro_hcl_tariff_impact_results/
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"AI seemingly makes an impact"
Oh it's going to make an impact, all right.
It's going to create so much bullshit and chaos that even Board administrators are going to want to rehire actual humans to deal with problems.
But, given that it's the Board, by the time they get the numbers, it will be way too late for a lot of people.
Re: "AI seemingly makes an impact"
Don't forget skill atrophy.
People no longer invest in learning the trade and keeping up to date, because why?
Corporations destroyed the market and the trade by colluding with governments and will now suffer consequences.
If you ever get begged to fix what's broken, charge 10x or tell them to go whistle.
better or worse. can we even tell?
Having worked with very talented staff and many untalented staff at these companies... I wonder is the widely reported hallucinations rate of most AI better or worse? Or will they be more or less vulnerable to leeks and compromise?
What is for sure, the many companies and services we all rely on that depend on these companies are going to be finding out in the coming years.
I'm not sure if I should be shaking my head in dismay or nodding at the cleverness of applying AI to the often complained about offshoring /outsourcing companies?
Re: better or worse. can we even tell?
I'd agree that India and other developing economies have a mix of the best and worst of talent, but on balance the offshoring model hasn't seen much of the best, but plenty of the worst. Take a company who have offshored their first and second line tech support to India, and the result's always the same: atrocious service, agents who often can't help, offer wrong advice, take forever to fix even simple issues. That's no reflection on the country, but it is a reflection on the business processes and low standards of both the customer company and those who offer outsource services.
Can AI be any worse than this? At the very least, AI will appear to have the language skills to be intelligible to customers, so there's an advance. In terms of incorrect advice, I'd expect that from AI, but the meat sack model already offers this. As for vulnerability to allium ampeloprasum, I'm uncertain.
A-I
> All also report that clients are hungry for AI expertise, so they can put the technology to work streamlining their operations.
I was working for a robotics company a little while ago, and they hired a Ph.D AI specialist to help integrate AI into the robot's OS. When all had settled, the result was: a decision tree.
I remarked that this is very simple, just an "if" statement during the execution of the workflow. The response I got back was, well, yes, but it _is_ still AI, isn't it? ... and yes, it is. Technically.
When I read lines like the one quoted here, what I hear is: companies are clamoring for automation. "AI" is simply the term that they've learned to use for it. There is so much simplistic crap that they're doing that they're starting to become aware of it. In the CI/CD field, the cloud-infrastructure field, automation is a part of life - from terraform modules to scripts to help us do things. In the areas of using UI applications to point-and-click users through a workflow, not so much. Spreadsheets? Perhaps if the business types learn to write them. What grows up instead is human-intensive workflows.
It's a call for Developers, Developers, Developers!!! ... they phrase it incorrectly, but if people remind them, then technologists rejoice: you're whom they want. The next two years will be difficult, the next four years will amount to a rennaissance.
Spaghetti
Turns out AI is better at making Spaghetti Code.
"using more AI to deliver services for clients"
I can't decide whether to fell sorry for those clients or a delight in a large helping of Shadenfreude for their misfortune.
The clients' clients (potentially us) have my deepest sympathy — the shitty service they have endured so far will now come hard coated with AI shit… a sort of compacted fecal M&M (Merde et Merde?)