IT major HCL Tech is confident of a stable demand despite the cautious market sentiment, given the underlying strength of its business and its well-balanced revenue streams divided among services, software and artificial intelligence (AI).
Addressing the company’s 34th annual general meeting on Wednesday, Chairperson Roshni Nadar Malhotra reassured shareholders that HCLTech is focused on achieving high growth levels while maintaining robust margins through solid deal execution, productivity gains and strategic investments.
“We continue to embed AI deeply into service delivery to unlock efficiencies, improve productivity and accelerate business outcomes,” she said. Malhotra admitted that despite more withdrawn discretionary spending, the overall demand environment is still stable as was proven by the company’s record first-quarter total contract value (TCV) bookings of $2.4 billion.
“This excludes a mega deal and a large deal that was signed in July. So, we continue to see active client decision-making despite macro uncertainty,” she stated. “Technology spending will remain a strategic priority for enterprises, and they will look for trusted partners like HCLTech to modernise operations, harness AI, and achieve measurable outcomes at scale.”
Additionally, she pointed out that while HCLTech’s consolidated net profit for FY26 was down by 104 basis points due to one-time restructuring costs and a labour code charge, earnings before interest and taxes (Ebit) stood at 17.9% of revenue barring these reductions. This implied that the margins were in line with the company’s revised guidance for the full year.
The company now has AI offerings spread across multiple layers of the AI stack — enterprise AI transformation platform AI Force, AI factory, AI data centre and infrastructure services, custom silicon engineering, AI inferencing chip, ASIC development, physical AI, intelligent products, robotics and autonomous systems, industry AI solutions and IP, AI-led marketing services, and AI-native campaign creation and execution.
AI-native and AI-amplified services offered by the firm are especially showing strong growth, Malhotra noted, while AI-led productivity gains are increasingly being incorporated into client projects and renewals.
AI is also accelerating the shift from time and headcount-based contracts to more outcome-based and fixed-price contracts, she remarked, but margins held up. “Clients are increasingly open to outcome-based and fixed-price projects where productivity savings are pre-calculated into a lower total cost for the client, while protecting HCL tax margins,” she added.
Defending any perceived softness in its software segment, Malhotra reaffirmed an increase of 2.9% year-on-year at `12,397 crore for FY26. She added that critical strategic investments made by HCLTech in AI marketing platform Jaspersoft and agentic AI startup Wobby had played a key role in boosting their analytics and data software portfolio. “We see the growth products in this area continue to perform,” she noted.
The company also highlighted its $150-million investment in homegrown full-stack AI firm Sarvam and partnerships with global players including Google Cloud, OpenAI, Intel and AWS.
Malhotra also said that AI talent capability building is a primary objective, with 24,000 HCLTech employees being trained internally on GenAI and more than 200 employees achieving black belt certification in the first-quarter itself.