HCLTech is leading India’s IT sector in AI. Last quarter, the company signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI, making it the only major Indian IT firm with direct access to ChatGPT’s portfolio.

Apoorv Iyer, EVP & global head (AI/GenAI) at HCLTech, said the tie-up is a turning point and the impact is threefold.

“We were the only large SI chosen after a technical assessment,” Iyer told AIM. “The focus is on capability building, adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise, creating strong technical AI solutions with OpenAI, and taking them to customers in healthcare, manufacturing, and BFSI.”

Iyer said that HCLTech has early access to some of the OpenAI models and is working with them very closely to make sure they are evaluated well and benchmarked for use cases. “We also have a partnership with Anthropic from a cloud model standpoint,” Iyer said.

Unlike peers who still depend on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, HCLTech has bypassed the hyperscaler middle layer. The partnership also makes HCLTech an early customer of OpenAI, embedding its stack internally. “We are driving a lot of unique use cases within HCLTech on their models and solutions,” Iyer said.

The AI Revenue Question

While smaller firms like Sonata Software and Happiest Minds are claiming 15–20% of their revenue from AI, HCLTech, Infosys, and others have not yet separated this segment. Iyer explained that, similar to AI washing in India’s IT sector, the same is now true for agentic AI. It’s the current buzzword among the leading IT firms that are developing hundreds of AI agents. 

“I would say a lot of firms started to be early in reporting AI revenue, but there was a lot of AI washing happening in this space,” he added. “The real truth is that AI is everywhere—in every deal, every pipeline.”

Iyer said that calculating revenue from AI is similar to how firms were tracking cloud revenue five years ago. “Today, everything is cloud [revenue]. AI is likely to follow a similar path. Almost all deals now include AI enablement and AI solutioning. Distinguishing what constitutes AI revenue and what does not is vague,” he said.

He noted that there’s a lot of superficial claiming of agency in the field, with people describing simple tasks and labelling them as agents. “It is not really about the quantity of agents, it is about the complexity, quality and adoption of AI within your customer base and enterprise,” he said.

HCLTech is embracing it with products such as UnO, an agent orchestrator, and VisionX, an AI-powered port operations platform. Iyer states that this approach is unique.

Full-Stack AI Play

Apart from OpenAI, HCLTech has also partnered with SAP, NVIDIA, and ServiceNow for joint training and research & development initiatives. 

The company’s offerings are packed into four branded stacks: AI Force, AI Foundry, AI Engineering, and AI Labs. AI Force already has 35 customers and 70 deployments, with HCLTech aiming to reach 200 by next year. “These are all places where customers can come in, build MVPs, and prioritise use cases,” Iyer said.

Furthermore, Indian IT firms are also focusing on extensive internal AI coding. For instance, Cognizant recently ran a vibe-coding week, and Coforge is working with Lovable and Windsurf for its upcoming TechCon conference. Similarly, HCLTech’s approach is to democratise AI beyond just engineers. 

Iyer acknowledged that revenue per employee is inherently nonlinear. “We have already said publicly that nonlinearity is a reality. But the focus is not on reducing employees — it’s on gaining more opportunities and market share.”

The shift is already transforming the IT sector, with changes to structures, skills, and capabilities. Iyer views this as a positive opportunity for industry transformation. 

“You don’t need to be technically savvy to prototype. But vibe coding by itself means nothing unless you can scale to 10,000 users in production,” Iyer said.

On trust and governance, he highlighted HCLTech’s Office of Responsible AI, red-teaming models, and involvement in the EU AI Act and the White House AI plan. The company has even collaborated with MIT on agentic AI. In India, it utilises the Shiv Nadar Foundation and Shiv Nadar University to develop AI talent.

“The pace of AI is very high. We have to be fast-paced, assertive and confident. That’s what will decide whether any company can adapt and continue to be relevant,” Iyer admitted. “We really think hard about how to take things to production and scale and option in the enterprise, so that you get the right ROI.”

The Hard Numbers

Although HCLTech touts its OpenAI partnership and agentic AI capabilities, its Q1 FY26 figures reveal a more challenging reality. Profit fell 9.7% YoY to ₹3,843 crore, while revenue increased 3.7% to ₹30,349 crore. Generative AI deals declined to nine from 12 in the previous quarter.

CEO C Vijayakumar, during the Q1 FY26 earnings call, insisted the AI narrative is landing. “Our propositions are resonating well with clients and have been augmented further by our partnership with OpenAI,” he said. He also pointed out that around 127,000 employees are trained as AI users, including 42,000 with advanced training.

Meanwhile, TCS reported weak growth in the same quarter and talked less about GenAI. And its peer, Infosys, is hedging bets with modular AI and in-house small language models. Wipro, another tech firm in the agentic league, is leaning into AI templates for healthcare and pharma. 

Read: Indian IT’s AI Talks Get Louder as Revenues Go Mute

Regardless, HCLTech, by securing a direct line into OpenAI, has broken ranks. And whether this partnership will pay off in the long run is something to wait and watch as the industry upskills its workforce and embraces the change, by redefining roles, be it software engineering, IT operations, or business processes.

The post HCLTech AI Head Calls Out Agentic Washing in Indian IT appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.