Narayan AmmachchiIndian IT major Tech Mahindra will lay off as many as 5,000 employees by April this year, as machines take over jobs from humans at the company’s BPO unit.
Headcount at the company will no longer be in line with its revenue growth, because technology “makes it possible for a single individual to accomplish multiple” tasks, reported the Press Trust of India (PTI), citing the company’s Managing Director CP Gurnani.
The news comes after the IT provider laid off around 2,500 employees in the third fiscal quarter ending the 31st of December 2020.
“What has happened is I used to have around 43,000 employees at the end of FY20, at the end of FY21, I expect to have about 38,000 employees in BPS (or BPO). But that is because the productivity has increased and the revenue has also gone up,” the executive explained to the newswire.
Tech Mahindra says it has deployed several chatbots in its BPO centers and that almost every employee is aided by virtual assistants.
The executive conceded that automation leads to a significant decrease in employment, yet argued that new technologies, such as analytics and artificial intelligence, are critical tools to deliver “desired outcomes” to customers.
Like many of its peers, Tech Mahindra is shuttering many of its offices and asking its employees to continue working from home. However, in a call with investors recently, the company’s executives said they had not yet started saving money from the remote-working practice.
In the end, Gurani said, around 40% of the employees may resume working from the office, depending on “their desires and client requirements”.
Tech Mahindra posted US$178 million in consolidated net revenue for the December quarter, an increase of US$27 million compared to the same quarter a year ago.
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