India’s largest IT services firms are reimagining campus hiring by prioritising graduates equipped with AI, cybersecurity, and data skills, emphasising specialised ‘forward deployed engineers’ to meet soaring demand for AI integration in business services.
India’s largest IT services companies are reviving campus recruitment, but with a different ambition from the mass hiring drives of the past: they want graduates who can contribute to artificial intelligence work from day one. Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCLTech and Tech Mahindra are all back in engineering colleges after a cautious spell, reflecting rising demand for AI skills and a shift away from broad-based intake. According to reports from Moneycontrol and Business Standard, the new emphasis is on smaller, more selective hiring of students with digital, AI, cybersecurity, cloud and data engineering skills.
TCS has emerged as the clearest example of the change. Moneycontrol reported that the company onboarded about 14,000 campus graduates in the April-June quarter of FY27, while The Economic Times said it plans to hire up to 8,900 AI deployment engineers. Chief executive K. Krithivasan has argued that the firm is investing in talent development and in bringing AI into client work, rather than treating the technology as a threat to outsourcing. The company is also said to be looking at AI acquisitions as it tries to deepen its capabilities.
The broader industry is moving in a similar direction, though not always at the same pace. According to a report by SightsInPlus, leaders at LTM, TCS, HCLTech and Tech Mahindra have said AI will not sharply reduce campus hiring, and fresh graduates will remain central to long-term workforce plans. Tech Mahindra has indicated it will restart fresher hiring after pausing campus recruitment last year, while HCLTech is focusing on a narrower elite group of graduates who could be developed into specialised deployment engineers over the next two to three years.
What is changing is the kind of engineer these firms want. Talent specialists quoted by Moneycontrol said companies are now looking for “forward deployed engineers” or FDEs, a role that blends software engineering with product understanding, client-facing consulting and AI expertise. The model was popularised by Palantir, and Indian firms are increasingly trying to build their own version. Infosys has said it intends to hire about 6,000 such engineers over the coming years, while Coforge wants to raise its dedicated FDE pool to at least 100 specialists by the end of the year.
This reflects a wider transformation in enterprise AI. Companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Amazon Web Services have been building sales, deployment and delivery teams to help customers embed AI into complex business systems. That has created space for new ventures too, including Hang Ten Systems, the enterprise AI company founded by former Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka, which recently raised $32 million. Yet executives at Infosys and TCS argue the rise of AI specialists strengthens rather than undermines the services model, because large IT providers still sit on deep client relationships, scale and operational experience that newer entrants lack.
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