LTIMindtree builds 1,500 AI 'digital employees' as CEO Lambu bets on agentic future

LTIMindtree has built about 1,500 artificial intelligence powered “digital employees”, deploying them across finance, infrastructure operations and customer service as one of India's largest IT firms accelerates push for nonlinear growth in the AI era.
“We have created digital personas of the agents. They have an employee ID, a persona and a face, which is AI-generated,” CEO Venu Lambu told Moneycontrol in an interview last week.
Each agent has a human mentor responsible for training and supervising and Lambu said at some point, some of them might even be “retired” or “fired” if they do not learn well enough.
Nonlinear growth already showing
This agentic strategy, combined with a sharper focus on fresher hiring and reskilling, is already beginning to break the traditional linearity between revenue and people, Lambu claimed.
If you look at the first half of the year (Q2FY26), LTIMindtree added more than $64 million in incremental revenue and grew over 2 percent across the two quarters, even as lateral headcount declined, he said.
“Our lateral hiring is not actually increasing. Whatever headcount increase that you see is actually because of the fresher side that we are doing,” Lambu said, adding experienced headcount went down by almost 1,900 in the first half.
Over a five-year horizon, LTIMindtree is planning for almost 2x revenue but not 2x people. “If we are growing 2x over the next five years or so, headcount should grow probably at 1.2x or 1.3x,” Lambu said.
To support that, the company has accelerated fresher intake to “correct the pyramid” and redeployed people from governance and management layers into delivery roles by changing span of control.
“We grew our revenue, we grew our clients and business, and across we did not add the headcount. That means the existing team actually got opportunities,” he said.
Agents at work: from finance to infrastructure
Internally, LTIMindtree is using AI agents most aggressively in finance and run operations.
“Our finance is actually one of the biggest champions of AI,” Lambu said.
Client onboarding compliance checks, invoice processing and account receivables notifications are already handled by agents, with humans in the loop.
On the operations side, freshers are increasingly assigned to infrastructure work, where “they have a major role to play”, he said.
He calls these agents digital employees, while the human staff are their managers.
“When you think like that then your pragmatism steps in. My AI agents will not replace people. I am getting digital employees whose managers are human employees,” he said.
LTIMindtree has even created an internal agent for its CEO and has built agents for HR and sales, probably the first one to do so.
A sales agent built on copilot helps teams search case studies and similar examples from other customers worldwide and was showcased at Microsoft Ignite.
Also read: LTIMindtree will stop filing fresh H1-B visa applications: CEO Venu Lambu
A better 2026
Lambu said demand visibility for 2026 is improving, with clients showing clearer intent to spend on modernisation and AI readiness.
He expects tech budgets to loosen modestly after a year of caution, driven by vendor consolidation, data and application modernisation and early AI factory initiatives.
“I’m reasonably optimistic. The optimism gets slightly better with time,” he said, adding LTIMindtree is targeting a return to near double-digit growth momentum by the end of this year, which should carry into the next.