The company has a portfolio of 1,706 patent filings till last year, according to its latest annual report, out of which 237 are in AI and GenAI alone.
It also has 22 global design centres and 98 innovation labs in operation globally. More than 50 patents in AI have been granted.
“Our goal is 500 patents in the next 3 years. It should be one of the key metrics,” said Khushu, in an interaction with Business Standard in Mysuru last week.
He said, “We cannot talk the language of yesteryears trying to fight a monster or a beast of the modern times. This is my commitment to the board. To get there, I have to do everything right. You cannot fight a battle of AI readiness in front of customers by just saying, I have trained my employees.”
Filing patents, according to him, means the company has invested in training from a skilling perspective. “That means you have a set of people who have actually worked. And to file one patent, there would have been at least 20-30 other people doing it. This is the outcome of the investments we have made with our engineers over years,” he added. His team has about 150 people.
As part of a five-year strategy, LTTS will focus on software-defined vehicles (SDV), plant engineering, medical technologies, energy automation, and industrial automation.
Besides, it will also concentrate on data centre build-out which includes compute, storage, semiconductor, hardware design and data engineering.
The other metric is about how many projects have AI interventions to achieve the service level agreement (SLA). For LTTS, it is about 25 per cent currently.
When asked about adoption of AI and Agentic AI among clients, Khushu said they have moved on from proof of concept (PoC) and exploration to implementing it in production across design, manufacturing, automation, line automation, and material analysis.
He, however, cautioned that adoption across manufacturing enterprises is an expensive proposition because they are still trying to figure out the return on investments (RoI). The adoption is happening across the board but in smaller proportions.
He added, “And it's just a matter of time, maybe another two years, that we will have a situation where customers will come and say, my product design cycle, which was 36 months is now 18 because of these type of technologies that I've used. They are getting there.”
LTTS is also changing the way it hires from college campuses this fiscal with equal focus between fresh engineering graduates, freshers off campus and interns – which will culminate into full time jobs – through hackathons.
“The idea is that I need to make my supply chain agile for freshmen. Because freshers come with a commodity in which the supply side is longer but demand consumption is slower. So I need to match that. If I need 100, I'll hire 50 from campus, another 25 from off campus and the rest as interns. That way I get flexibility of changing my supply chain,” chief operating officer (COO) Munjay Singh said.
LTTS’ headcount remained nearly flat with 23,830 employees at the end of last financial year with the company expecting to add just 500 people this year, after adding the same number in the fourth quarter of FY26.
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