Infosys, India’s second largest IT services company by revenue, has 50.7 per cent, or 166,636, employees who are up to 30 years old, while 45.7 per cent, or 150,316 employees, are between 31 and 50 years, according to the company’s latest annual report.
The balance has been shifting over the last 14 years, with the average age of employees ticking up in the interim periods, for example in 2016 and 2020.
The shift does not necessarily mean the Bengaluru-based company is ageing but that the scope of work has shifted from just application development, maintenance, and other back end work to more concrete partnerships with clients in their digital and artificial intelligence (AI) transformation journey.
Infosys declined to comment on the topic.
In 2012, when the company had 149,994 employees on its payrolls, 116,997 people were below 30 years, and just 32,197 people in the next age bracket. It now employs a total of 328,594 people, with revenues of more than $20 billion as of March 2026.
Kamal Karanth, co-founder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing firm said the IT industry has over the last decade-and-a-half visibly moved up the value chain of offerings and services to clients.
“As a sector with man-hours as raw material, this elevation of billable offerings is primarily built on deployable higher cognitive capabilities. Senior tech professionals by virtue of their pedigree, experience, and multi-sector exposure were, and are, the ideal fit for the advisory and strategic elevation required in client engagements," he said. "Enterprises have hence done the needful to build, retain and nurture a sustainable internal pipeline of senior talent. Along with a bulging mid-layer and broadening top-layer, the last 4 years of conservative entry-level intakes has ushered a shape-shift across the sector.”
With growing focus on AI at the bottom and eventually the middle layers, it will not be entirely unexpected to witness a shift from the current barrel or diamond shape organisation to an inverted pyramid structure.
The trend also suggests that young engineers, with experience of five to eight years on average, are less likely to stick with IT services companies after joining from college campuses. That can be attributed to a host of reasons, among them largely-stagnant entry level pay despite inflation, impact of AI which has made companies reduce their dependency on campus hirings, and greater opportunities to join technology product companies and start ups which were limited 15 years ago.
It also shows that people who have stayed in Infosys for years are less likely to jump ship as job conditions remain uncertain due to macroeconomic uncertainties. Additionally, the impact of AI has made mid-career employees vulnerable to displacement. TCS, for example, let go almost 12,500 people last year, most of them middle and senior level managers.
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