Bengaluru/San Francisco: Artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming central to daily operations of India’s IT services industry leaders, with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro together deploying about 300,000 licences of Copilot — double the 150,000 licences at the end of December—across their workforce, a media release on Wednesday from the US tech giant showed.
That equates to a little over a fourth of the combined 1.15 million workforce of these three companies, which last year reported over $60 billion in revenue cumulatively.
“At this level of scale, the impact of AI is no longer measured solely by time saved or productivity gained—it is defined by how organizations operate, compete, and grow,” said Judson Althoff, chief executive of Microsoft Commercial Business, in the release.
“Infosys, TCS, and Wipro are moving beyond deployment to AI as an operating model, using Microsoft Copilot and agents to translate their unique IQ into better decisions, faster execution, and stronger customer outcomes,” he added.
While the pace of adoption of its virtual intelligent assistant is great news for Microsoft, it also poses questions about the current billing model of India’s IT $315-billion outsourcing industry as well as its hiring practices.
Mumbai-based TCS’s headcount declined by 23,460 last year due to its largest layoff drive. On the other hand, Infosys and Wipro saw their headcounts increase by 5,016 employees and 8,810 employees, respectively.
“The real opportunity with AI lies in how deeply it is embedded into everyday work,” said Salil Parekh, chief executive officer (CEO) of Infosys, as part of Microsoft’s release.
Bengaluru-based Infosys and Wipro have about 91% and 95% of their Copilot users active monthly, respectively, whereas 86% of Copilot-licensed associates at TCS use the tool in their daily work—internally for HR and sales-related functions, and externally for software development, maintenance and coding.
“This is an integral part of building an AI-first culture and shaping Human + AI operating model of the future. By embedding Agentic AI into the flow of work, our employees are redefining how work gets done,” said TCS CEO K. Krithivasan.
“At Wipro, we are embedding AI into everyday work to create real enterprise advantage—unlocking productivity, sharpening execution, accelerating innovation, enriching client experience, and delivering meaningful business outcomes for our clients,” said Srini Pallia, CEO of Wipro, as part of the Microsoft release.
Phil Fersht, chief executive of Massachusetts-based HFS Research, said the biggest impact of Copilot would be in productivity acceleration, and not in software product innovation.
“Developers will generate code faster, consultants will produce deliverables more efficiently, analysts will summarize and synthesize information quicker, and enterprise teams will automate a lot of repetitive internal work,” Fersht said.
Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at Gartner, said getting these licences is not as much about a reduction in the human workforce at IT firms, or mere efficiency or productivity measurements.
“Training as many engineers as possible on Copilot and similar platforms is crucial for IT services firms to adapt to how work has changed within these companies, and tools such as Copilot are central to monetizable AI applications and services,” Verma said. “That is what’s pushing adoption of Copilot and other such tools at IT firms.”
Fersht added that the large-scale adoption of these licences at Indian IT services firms is expected to not just boost Microsoft’s revenue, but also ensure that AI platformbecomes deeply embedded in how these firms deliver services to clients.
“These providers also influence thousands of enterprise customers globally, so widespread internal adoption strengthens Microsoft’s position as the default enterprise AI platform,” said Fersht.
Still, Copilot is not a first for homegrown IT firms. Since the start of the year, TCS and Infosys have announced partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic.
In February, Tata Group entered into a partnership with Anthropic, through which “several thousand” of its employees would gain access to premium ChatGPT models. The partnership would also include a multi-year agreement for OpenAI to use the in-progress data centre that TCS is building.
The same month, Infosys announced a partnership with Anthropic, under which it would develop AI software for firms in the telecommunications, financial services, and manufacturing sectors using Anthropic’s AI platform, Claude.
Simply put, partnerships between the world's most valuable AI companies and Indian IT firms suggest that the latter have become testbeds for the intelligent tools within Fortune 500 companies.
Microsoft’s press release stated as much. “The three global IT majors emerge as Frontier Firms in action — moving from large-scale rollout to enterprise-wide agentic AI operations, with India setting the pace in Asia,” said the statement.
Shouvik Das is in San Francisco at the invitation of Microsoft.
