TCS, Infosys, HCLTech CEOs strike confident note amid AI fears

CEOs of TCS, Infosys, and HCLTech at the India AI Impact Summit 2026.

At a time when global markets are rattled by claims that artificial intelligence (AI) could render traditional software and services obsolete, the chief executives of India’s three largest IT services firms struck a resolutely confident note, arguing that AI will expand opportunity rather than shrink it.

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit, K Krithivasan of Tata Consultancy Services, Salil Parekh of Infosys, and C Vijayakumar of HCLTech pushed back against predictions that AI agents will kill the services model within five years.

Their remarks come amid $300 billion global tech stocks correction and concerns that generative AI tools could automate large swathes of coding and enterprise software work.

Services Model Not Dead

Responding to a question by former CEO of NITI Aayog Amitabh Kant on a “provocative” claim by a prominent Bay Area investor, Parekh said opportunities from AI services runs into hundreds of billions of dollars in the next several years.

The provocation referenced here is by tech billionaire and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who said that by 2050, AI may eliminate large sections of white-collar employment with IT services and business process outsourcing (BPO) firms "almost completely disappearing" in five years.

Parekh also pointed to the fact that Infosys has hired about 20,000 freshers this year and is on track to hire a similar number in the next fiscal. “It's opening up really new set of opportunities and there is some productivity benefit that come with… but I'm sure, in general, if we execute and serve our clients, there will be more opportunity there,” Parekh added.

TCS’ Krithivasan noted that the role of system integrators that involves dealing with complex legacy systems won’t go away anytime soon with an LLM coming into the picture. Even if coding is getting automated, software engineers would still remain relevant as they are needed to test, validate and verify what’s being generated. Additionally, their roles will shift towards context engineering, cybersecurity etc.

“I don’t envisage a significant shrinkage of work in the coming years, but there will be more volume of work that will be produced, more volume, more volume of work that will be produced, and more interesting work that will be done,” he said during the discussion.

HCLTech’s Vijayakumar too concurred, as billions of dollars spent by the big tech giants would only create more work for IT services players.

“This big capex spend also triggers a lot of services spend, like building all of these data centers, AI factories, and that would mean the IT infrastructure landscape around the world would get refreshed over the next five to eight years. That itself is a huge services opportunity,” he said.

His comments came in response to Kant sharing that nearly $600 billion was spent by Microsoft, Google and Amazon alone in this year to expand their AI infrastructure.

AI impacting software jobs

Krithivasan shared that while AI is not entirely replacing jobs, but it has somewhat become a super power to enable non-technical people to code easily. He cited that example of a TCS workshop, wherein 1,500 kids from non-technical background who couldn’t speak fluent English either were able to build 1,500 applications in a span of three hours.

Vijayakumar said that there’s a big misconception that software coding, programming skills are not going to be relevant.

“Just orchestrating the work with multiple coding agents, that's also a skill. You have an opportunity to manage several agents to deliver an outcome which is 5x of what you would normally do,” said Vijayakumar.

Bhattacharya sees not just white-collared workers, but also blue-collared workers such as plumbers, carpenters and anganwadi workers to name a few, benefit from AI, as AI solves for access to information, timely payments and other services for them.