AROUND 50 YEARS AGO, one of India’s original ‘garage startups’ started life as a computer hardware firm. Set up by Shiv Nadar and five others, it entered the software services business in 1991. Today, the entity that began life as Hindustan Computers Ltd (HCL) is known more for its software services company HCLTech — India’s third-largest IT and consulting firm, with annual revenue just shy of $15 billion.

The success of companies such as HCLTech paved the way for massive wealth creation in the information technology sector, leading to first-generation entrepreneurs becoming billionaires. Today, India’s IT sector generates annual revenues of close to $315 billion, with the Top 3 firms employing nearly one million people in the country.

Coming back to the HCL Group, founder and billionaire Shiv Nadar, after passing on the baton of HCLTech to daughter Roshni Nadar Malhotra in 2020, gifted a chunk of its shares to her in 2025. Promoter entities hold 60.88% in HCLTech — including HCL Holdings Pvt. Ltd’s 16.46% and Vama Sundari Investments (Delhi) Pvt. Ltd’s 44.23%. 

Earlier, in March 2025, through separate gift deeds, Shiv Nadar transferred his 47% stake in HCL Corp. Pvt. Ltd and Vama Sundari Investments (Delhi) Pvt. Ltd to Roshni, which increased her shareholding in both the entities from the earlier 10.33% to 57.33%. According to the shareholding pattern as of Q1FY27, through Vama Sundari, Roshni’s proportionate shareholding in HCL Technologies Ltd is 25.359%. The shareholding in HCL Holdings Pvt. Ltd. is held through Vama Sundari Trust with her being the settler of this trust. With wealth of ₹2,22,976 crore ($23.42 billion), Roshni ranks No. 7 on Fortune India’s 2026 study of India’s Top 100 Billionaires.

Roshni is helming HCLTech at a critical time. With AI-led disruption, Indian IT firms are at an inflection point, trying to reinvent models and offerings to stay relevant, as the next leg of tech adoption takes shape. In a recent interview with Fortune India, she alluded to changes that AI has brought about, and how organisations and leaders have had to adapt to them. “Even in our industry, solutions regarding AI for enterprise customers didn’t exist a couple of years ago. But now we’re having to create them, so it’s being learnt in real time,” she had said.

HCLTech’s annualised advanced AI revenue touched $620 million in FY26, with the segment registering growth of 10.6% sequentially and 62.1% YoY. Roshni credits HCLSoftware, a division of HCLTech, for having brought much of the understanding around AI implementation early on. That also helped HCLTech figure out its playbook. “Today, when you apply AI, and you see how companies like ours in our industry will evolve, you have to decouple revenue growth with headcount growth, and some of that has already happened in software,” she had said.

There is reason for this confidence. Among large-cap IT firms, HCLTech posted industry-leading growth numbers for the past three years. For FY27, it has guided for revenue growth in the range of 1-4%, while the IT services business is expected to grow at 1.5-4.5%. Having an all-weather portfolio — not just engineering, digital and cloud, but also software — and with AI allowing for better productivity and utilisation, has allowed HCLTech to have a stable headcount. “I think leaning into our strengths — engineering, core engineering, and looking at new revenue streams such as physical AI, AI factory, working on much more outcome-based business model solutions with customers, some of that is going to become extremely important,” Roshni had said.

Research reports about HCLTech are bullish on its momentum. On the back of its Q1FY27 results, Nomura Research notes that it needs compounded quarterly growth rate of 0.5-2.5% overall and 0.9-2.9% in services to achieve its unchanged guidance. “We marginally raised our USD revenue growth estimate for HCL and now expect 3.1-5.3% YoY growth in FY27-28F (vs 2-4.5% earlier),” it says in a note dated July 13. It adds that it is raising its FY27-28F EPS estimates by 2-3% to factor in the Q1 results and the closure of the Jaspersoft acquisition.

AI and more

For a company that never shied away from inorganic growth, HCLTech’s bets have become more aggressive, and Roshni believes that given what is happening in AI, and how quickly tech is changing, “I think it’s much harder to do it organically”. Its recent acquisitions include agentic business intelligence platform Jaspersoft, Belgian AI data analyst agent startup Wobby, Singapore-based wealth management and core banking consulting firm Finergic Solutions, and more recently, an investment of $150 million into Sarvam AI for a 10% stake.

At its recent earnings call, CEO & MD C. Vijayakumar said HCLTech’s Sarvam bet will open up the sovereign AI market across industries and the government sector. “By combining Sarvam’s research depth in multilingual India-focussed AI models with HCLTech’s global enterprise relationship, engineering expertise, and software IP, we are creating a differentiated full-stack AI platform for governments and enterprises spanning models, platforms, applications and managed services,” he had said.

It also announced one of its biggest pivots in recent times by foraying into the AI data centre business. It sees a compelling opportunity with AI-led demand, supply constraints, and sovereignty coming together. The first AI data centre will come up at the Sovereign AI Park in Bhubaneswar, in partnership with Sarvam with a planned capital outlay of ₹14,257 crore, including financial assistance from the Odisha government. HCLTech seems to be betting on a 3A strategy: AI, aggressive acquisitions, and an all-weather portfolio.

Biswajit Maity, senior principal analyst at Gartner, says these bets in the mid-to-long term could help HCLTech generate higher-value recurring revenue streams, deepen client relationships, and strengthen its competitive positioning in regulated sectors such as government, BFSI, healthcare, and public services. “While the strategy introduces higher capital and execution risks than the asset-light approaches adopted by some peers, it also has the potential to create a sustainable competitive advantage if demand for sovereign and industry-specific AI solutions continues to accelerate,” says Maity.

The HCLTech stock, meanwhile, has seen volatility in recent months, just like its peers. This is because since the beginning of this year, every updated release of AI models by LLM companies has dragged down the BSE-focussed IT index, with IT stocks taking a hit. Since the beginning of 2026, among the top 3 IT firms, the stock price of HCLTech has fallen 19.29% till August 7, compared to 30.64% of Infosys and 28.95% of TCS. At a time when U.S.-based AI and technology companies are seeing a surge in their market cap and valuation on the back of AI buildout and demand, Roshni says the comparison would be unfair. “Valuation is only as good if you’re going to sell the company and we have no plans,” she had said.