TCS’s Big Leadership Reshuffle Follows Its Worst Senior Exodus in Years

Tata Consultancy Services split its single largest business in two this week and moved about a dozen senior executives into new jobs. It is the most sweeping leadership shake-up at India’s biggest IT services company since 2023. The changes touch banking, cybersecurity, energy, travel and four countries, and most took effect immediately.

TCS is framing the overhaul as a bet on artificial intelligence, platform modernization and industry-specific growth. It lands three months after the company acknowledged losing more than 300 senior leaders in eight months, the sharpest executive exodus in its history as a public company.

TCS Splits Its Biggest Business into Two Groups

The centerpiece is banking, financial services and insurance, or BFSI, in the Americas. The vertical supplies more than 30% of TCS’s revenue, making it the company’s single largest business. Susheel Vasudevan, who ran the combined unit, moves into a strategic role reporting directly to TCS chief executive K Krithivasan.

In his place, TCS created two separate business groups. Rakesh Kumar, who led BFSI’s US West business, and Mohan Veeturi, who ran BFSI US East Banking, now each head one of the new units.

“The scale, complexity and opportunity landscape within this business continue to expand rapidly,” Krithivasan said in internal communication to staff explaining the split.

The rest of the reorganization is just as broad. In Canada, Manmeet Chhabra, previously the country’s BFSI head, becomes TCS Canada country head, replacing Soumen Roy, who moves to lead the company’s Global Value and Innovation Centres business. Arun Pradeep now heads a new Travel, Transport and Hospitality group, and Sabyasachi Chandra, formerly head of North America utilities, leads a newly standalone Energy, Resources and Utilities unit. In Europe, Ganesa Vaikuntam moves from running TCS’s cybersecurity service line to head life sciences for the UK and Europe, succeeding Vikas Jain.

TCS also built new units around specific technology bets. Kumaranarayanan, who led North America energy and resources, now runs the cybersecurity business. Rajnish Palande becomes global head of a newly created ServiceNow Business Unit, and Akhilesh Tripathi takes charge of a new US West Coast group targeting technology, semiconductor and software clients. TCS combined its communications, media, information services and technology businesses under V. Rajanna, while Akhilesh Tiwari now leads global sales for a new Autonomous Business Operations unit.

Chief operating officer Aarthi Subramanian, who announced several of the changes, said the new unit reflects where clients are heading. “ABO is emerging as a significant opportunity for TCS as clients look to reimagine business processes, improve productivity, build resilience, and unlock AI-led operating models,” she said.

TCS said the appointments take effect immediately across most of the roles listed above.

The Order Book Behind the Timing

The reshuffle landed four days after TCS reported results for the first quarter of fiscal 2027, and those numbers explain some of the urgency. Revenue rose 13.9% year over year to ₹72,275 crore. In dollar terms it was nearly flat at $7.624 billion, up just 0.4% sequentially in constant currency, according to the company’s own quarterly results release.

North America, which supplies close to half of TCS’s revenue, actually declined 0.4% sequentially. The order book fell to $9.5 billion in total contract value, down from $12 billion the prior quarter, a drop of roughly 21%. Operating margin slipped to 24%, down 130 basis points, as annual wage hikes pushed employee costs to 58.3% of revenue.

The one line moving the other way was artificial intelligence. Annualized AI revenue hit $2.6 billion in the quarter, up 13.6% sequentially. That AI run rate helped push TCS stock past the Nifty even as the broader order book cooled.

TCS Lost More Than 300 Senior Leaders Before This Reshuffle

The new organization chart lands on a bench that had already thinned. Every executive named this week was promoted or reassigned from inside TCS, not hired from outside, at a company that spent early this year managing its sharpest executive exodus in decades.

People familiar with the departures blamed a squeeze on variable pay for much of the churn, even as senior leaders took on more responsibility during a slower growth stretch. Company-wide attrition stayed a more ordinary 13.5% over roughly the same period, in line with rivals Infosys, HCL Technologies and Cognizant. The unusual part was concentrated at the very top.

• 300+ senior executives left TCS in the eight months to March 31, according to a report in the Indian financial daily Mint.
• 16% of the company’s top 1,800 executives exited within a year, against a typical 4-5% annual rate since TCS’s 2004 stock market listing.
• Less than 10% of variable pay went out to senior leaders over the two years before the exodus.
• 593,798 employees made up TCS’s workforce at the end of June, down from 613,069 a year earlier, a decline of roughly 3% even as revenue grew.

None of the names in this week’s reshuffle came from outside the building.

Did TCS Just Contradict Its Own No-Layoffs Promise?

TCS has not announced new layoffs alongside this reshuffle, and every executive named this week was already on the payroll, promoted or reassigned rather than hired from outside. Still, the scale of internal movement, about a dozen roles across six geographies, comes weeks after a different message from TCS chairman N. Chandrasekaran to shareholders.

Speaking at TCS’s 31st annual general meeting, Chandrasekaran tried to calm concerns about AI and jobs across the technology sector.

There is no downsizing of staff. That is not planned at all. We just want to have the right talent.

Chandrasekaran made those remarks weeks before TCS disclosed one of its broadest reorganizations in years, according to remarks reported from the shareholder meeting. TCS has not linked the two events, and the reshuffle memo makes no mention of headcount.

The company has leaned on the same explanation since it shifted to a vertical-based operating model in 2023: fewer, more focused business groups are supposed to make it easier to hold individual leaders accountable for growth.

Anthropic, Mistral and the New AI Bet

The clearest sign of where TCS wants the reorganized company to go sits in the deals it announced alongside its results, not just the org chart. The company used the same quarter to lock in AI partnerships that several of the new units exist to sell.

• Anthropic: TCS will license Claude across 50,000 associates in engineering, finance, legal, marketing and sales, and is building a dedicated business unit around Claude-based services.
• Mistral AI: TCS became the first global systems integrator partner for Mistral Forge, a platform for building proprietary AI models on internal company data.
• ServiceNow: an expanded alliance covering joint go-to-market work and delivery, now backed by the new ServiceNow Business Unit under Rajnish Palande.
• Google Cloud: an expanded collaboration aimed at enterprise AI adoption and autonomous operating models.

Details on the Anthropic and Mistral deals come from CRN Asia’s reporting on TCS’s latest AI wins. Both partnerships map onto the Autonomous Business Operations unit that Akhilesh Tiwari now runs, and onto the enlarged BFSI groups, where AI-led modernization work is already TCS’s fastest-growing line.

TCS is not alone in pushing AI coding and support tools into its delivery teams. TCS, Infosys and Wipro have collectively passed 300,000 Copilot seats, showing how much of the new org chart doubles as a sales structure for AI tools TCS has already bought.

The New Bosses Inherit a Shrinking Order Book

Rakesh Kumar and Mohan Veeturi now run a BFSI Americas business that is bigger on paper and softer on bookings than it was two quarters ago.

Krithivasan told analysts the pressure should ease. “I expect demand to improve sometime in Q2. So, we are generally optimistic on Q2,” he said on the earnings call, according to a transcript reported by Business Standard.

That optimism now rests on two leaders splitting a job one person used to run alone. Vasudevan, who oversaw the full combined BFSI Americas business, has moved into a strategic role advising Krithivasan instead of running a single profit and loss line.

TCS does not issue formal quarterly guidance. Management has said only that it expects broader demand to normalize as AI adoption spreads and client budgets loosen. The company is paying a ₹12-a-share dividend from the same results on July 31, even as it faces questions about whether its dividend policy can keep funding the AI build. That payout goes out under an organization chart that did not exist when the June quarter it covers came to a close.