Bengaluru, Feb. 26 -- Tata Consultancy Services Ltd chief executive officer (CEO) K. Krithivasan has issued a directive to the top brass: build or become obsolete. In a push towards an artificial intelligence (AI)-first future, he warned that while junior associates in India's largest information technology (IT) services exporter are mastering generative tools, senior management is still reading and hearing rather than creating. "What we find is that our associates at the junior level are probably more proficient, more comfortable with the new technology. As people go to the senior level, we tend to read a lot, hear about them a lot, but we don't build enough (solutions)," said Krithivasan, during a fireside chat in the Nasscom (National Association of Software and Service Companies) Technology and Leadership Forum in Mumbai. "So, we need to define and basically insist that all of us, all the senior management, must build something on that knowledge so they understand how it is going. It's just not about asking questions; it's how you build, how soon you can build and when you build it, what we are doing manually to ensure that it works," added Krithivasan. His comments come after the company conducted arguably its largest layoff drive, letting go of about 12,200 executives at the middle and senior levels to make it future-ready last year. As of March 2024, almost half of TCS's workforce, or about 451,160 employees, were under the age of 30. This is lower than FY22, when employees in this cohort accounted for about 60% of the workforce. The company did not disclose the age breakup of its employees in its FY25 annual report. Employees across the board are mandated to learn basic AI tools. This is across most companies. He reiterated that employees were also urged to use AI even if it meant cannibalizing existing revenue. Krithivasan's comments come as fresh concerns mount over the relevance of the country's IT industry. "See, we don't have to really incentivize because everybody wants to learn this tech. We need to tell them that one, I am giving you enough opportunity to learn, two, I am encouraging you to ensure that every solution you provide to your customer is AI-first. As I said, even if it means that we are cannibalizing the revenue," added Krithivasan. Krithivasan's comments come less than a fortnight after Tata Sons chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran also made a similar pitch at TCS's annual two-day summit at Abu Dhabi....