Narayan AmmachchiIndia’s largest IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) says it would rather add new talent to its payroll than reduce the IT workforce.
“We are here to create jobs, not to downsize,” asserted the company’s CEO Rajesh Gopinathan in an interview with India-Abroad News Service.
His statement stands in contrast to comments made by other IT leaders and industry analysts, who have long been predicting that the advent of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, would lead to widespread layoffs in the country’s $150 billion IT services industry.
Such predictions appeared to be materializing when reports surfaced that some top technology outsourcing firms, including Infosys and Cognizant, were gearing up to fire thousands of their Indian staff.
News reports have highlighted that more than 50,000 Indian technology professionals would soon lose their jobs because of automation and US restrictions on the H-1B visa.
TCS, it seems, does not really believe that new technologies would dramatically reduce the need for IT companies to employ a large workforce.
In its recent study, the Mumbai-based firm argued that artificial intelligence would largely be used to automate corporate functions, including finance, HR management, marketing, and customer service.
New technologies are likely to make some existing jobs obsolete, but would also give birth to new jobs, the IT firm noted, adding that IT companies are not automating their processes at the same speed as those in other industries, such as manufacturing.
This week, TCS launched a large delivery center in the central Indian state of Bihar as part of the federal government’s ambition to take outsourcing jobs to the country’s hinterlands, beyond the busy metropolises like Bangalore and Hyderabad.
Its delivery center in Bihar alone is expected to create more than 4,000 jobs.
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