LTM Reorganizes Workforce Around Artificial Intelligence for 'AI Growth Era'

IT services firm, LTM (formerly LTIMindtree) is reorganising its workforce, delivery model and customer engagements around artificial intelligence as the company prepares for what CEO and Managing Director Venu Lambu describes as the industry’s transition from an “AI productivity era” to an “AI growth era”. The strategy is already visible across the company’s operations. LTM has deployed around 1,500 AI-powered digital employees, launched a programme to build more than 1,000 specialised AI engineers and is increasingly adopting outcome-based commercial models as enterprises ramp up AI spending. “We’re already on that journey and have a pretty well-developed mechanism on how we deploy AI agents. We make sure that we govern them well,” Lambu told FE. The digital employees, which work alongside human staff, are built on proprietary datasets and assigned employee IDs, personas, mentors and performance ratings. Their output is continuously monitored and refined through human oversight. Under-performing agents are retired and replaced with more capable versions, creating what Lambu describes as a governed framework for scaling AI within enterprise projects. Yet, despite growing concerns that AI could displace jobs, Lambu said that the technology is changing the composition of the workforce rather than eliminating opportunities. While lateral hiring is likely to remain moderated, the company intends to continue hiring fresh graduates in large numbers. “Last year, our revenue grew 6% while having a decline in lateral headcount. This year too we will be adding a very sizeable number of freshers,” he said. AI tools, he added, are helping improve productivity and enabling entry-level employees to take on responsibilities that previously required several years of experience. “It’s a great opportunity to do work which probably people with three to five years of experience would have done a few years back.” The workforce transformation is also creating new categories of talent. Earlier this month, LTM launched AI1000, an initiative aimed at building a pipeline of more than 1,000 Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE), specialists who combine software engineering, data expertise and domain knowledge to build and deploy AI solutions for clients. According to Lambu, these teams are helping accelerate software release cycles from weekly or monthly timelines to just a few hours. “The thousand FDEs equate to three or four times the capacity of a traditional IT operating model because of their exponential outcomes,” he said. The shift is taking place even as investors increasingly scrutinise the ability of IT services firms to monetise AI investments. Lambu believes the industry is moving beyond the initial phase of productivity gains and entering a period where AI will become a driver of growth. “Back in 2024, we were one of the earliest companies to pass productivity gains from AI to customers. We have passed that phase. I believe we’re at the start of what I call the AI growth era,” he said. For LTM, the key differentiator in that phase will not be access to AI models, but the ability to combine them with industry expertise and enterprise data. “When intelligence is democratised, context and domain is premium because you can’t apply the frontier models as is,” Lambu said. “This concept of modernising technology, bringing in context and domain, aligning the data to the new AI solution is what I call Applied AI, which is where I believe LTM will lead.”