Grads with AI skills 60% of TCS' fresher hiring: HR head Sudeep Kunnumal

TCS is rapidly increasing hiring of engineering graduates with specialised AI and digital skills, with high-skill cadres now accounting for 60% of fresher intake as it pursues an AI-first strategy

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services company, is sharply increasing its intake of engineering graduates with niche AI skills, as entry-level hiring shifts toward specialised capabilities. 

The company’s four-tier fresher hiring structure has seen a significant tilt toward higher-skilled roles. Of the top three tiers — Prime, Digital, and Ninja — the share of Prime and Digital hires has risen substantially. 

“We have seen a 50 per cent increase in volume that we hire in the prime and digital cadre from what we have done. And we want to increase more. Previously, it was about 10-15 per cent three years back. But now, it has gone up to 60 per cent,” said Sudeep Kunnumal, chief human resources officer, TCS. He spoke with Business Standard on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit. 

A prime hire can have a salary as high as ₹11 lakh at the entry level and above. 

Overall, the company now has about 270,000 people in advanced skills, Kunnumal shared. “This is 3x compared to a year ago. We have this aspiration to be the world’s largest AI-led tech services company.”  Every three minutes the firm is getting a person trained in AI, he added. 

TCS has a five pillar strategy for creating an AI-first company, “and one of the first pillar is to create an AI-first mindset, which means you first give right of refusal to AI to solve any problem”, Kunnumal said. The second thing is there is always a human in the loop, he added. 

AI is meant to augment human capability rather than replace it, according to him. “Being a tech services company, the power and opportunity of understanding the customer and their context is very deep. Our employees know what is responsible AI. They understand the risks, what are the hallucinations and biases to set up guardrails, they also have technology skills to be able to use AI contextually to solve customer problems,” he explained. 

On TCS’s headcount declining to about 582,000 from a peak of 622,000, Kunnumal said the reduction was part of efforts to become future-ready. “We continue to hire and in the last calendar year, we hired more than 85,000 people. I don’t think that the numbers will oscillate, but it will stabilise at least. We also do not have to take any more restructuring expense,” he said. 

Despite a falling headcount, the company’s attrition, too, has gone up. At the end of the third quarter attrition was at 13 per cent.

“The number is a little beyond our comfort area and we definitely want to be much lower, something around the lower double digit range. So, we are making all the efforts by engaging and doing the right interventions to reduce it further,” he said. 

This includes a very hyper-personalised connection with individuals and having deep conversation with them on their aspirations. The firm has democratised compensations through its ‘Elevate’ framework, he added. 

The company is looking at adding a new skill set of employees for its new data centre business, HyperVault, Kunnumal said.

“We are hiring leadership talent also, globally from the market. It is a new industry that TCS was not in. It is the first AI data centre in India that needs different capabilities in terms of technology, people, design, architecture, and power,” he added. 

For HyperVault, the initial focus will be on hiring design and architecture talent, particularly those with expertise in rack systems and power infrastructure. “We won’t need a very large team, but it has to be highly capable and competent, as we are attempting something that hasn’t been done in India before,” he added.