New Delhi, Jan 18 (PTI) Nasdaq-listed Exlservice Holdings plans to set up two new centres in tier-2 or tier-3 Indian cities this year, as the data and artificial intelligence (AI) company looks to tap
infrastructure and talent advantages beyond the metros, according to CEO Rohit Kapoor.
Kapoor told PTI in an interview that overall, the global IT spends are rising, with a catch - the allocations are skewed towards AI, infrastructure, and cybersecurity, areas that are creating opportunities for strong pivots from legacy maintenance and upkeep of technology services.
The firm, which employs nearly 45,000 of its 60,000-plus strong global workforce in India, is lining up client and infrastructure plans for the two new centres.
"From an infrastructure standpoint, we do think that going to the tier 2/3 cities in India will be important for us, so we've identified a shortlist of a couple of cities where we want to be able to build new infrastructure and to offer services to our clients from those locations," he said.
Typically, new centres such as these target 500-100 FTEs (Full-Time Equivalents) in terms of capacity, so "meaningful size and scale" can attract management and leadership talent and be able to serve multiple clients.
"Today, in total we have close to about 45,000 employees in India out of nearly 63,000 employees globally now," he said.
Kapoor said he expects both the centres to be up and running this year.
"We've already identified the locations, and started to build out the plans for that and we've identified clients that we are going to be moving into those locations," he said.
He declined to divulge the specific cities that have been identified, saying plans are still being firmed up.
"...so I wouldn't be able to share the details but there are two cities that we've got and we're working on going ahead with that," he said.
EXL has positioned itself as a data and AI-centric company, and Kapoor said digital operations management currently accounts for 44 per cent of revenue while data analytics/AI contributed 56 per cent to the total annual revenue of nearly USD 2 billion.
The firm employs over 60,000 people across 12 geographies, with the US as its primary market and 80 per cent of the revenue basket coming from insurance, healthcare, and banking/financial services clients.
Kapoor said India remains core to EXL's delivery ecosystem, with exceptional talent in digital operations, data analytics, and AI, which the company continues to leverage for growth.
According to him, clients now demand AI-driven workflow reimagination rather than mere efficiency gains, requiring innovation, human-AI collaboration, and deep domain knowledge, areas where EXL scores due to its operational expertise.
"Things have changed completely because in the past most of the work that we would handle for our clients would be to take the work that our clients were doing, but just run that more efficiently, a lot cheaper and better.
"But today our clients are asking us to reimagine their workflows so there's a lot of innovation and creativity associated with it. There's a lot of engagement that we need to drive between human and the AI and bring pieces together, so it is a very different way of working," he said.
Kapoor cited insurance underwriting as an example where AI tools have the ability to synthesise data and pre-answers queries, slashing quote times from weeks to hours, transforming human roles from manual decision-making to oversight.
While AI adoption saw initial hype followed by caution over return on investment, Kapoor predicts 2026 will bring focussed investments in proven use cases with partners like EXL, amid rising overall IT spends favouring AI, infrastructure, and cybersecurity.
"The good news is that overall IT spend is increasing so that has not diminished. The allocation of that IT spend into AI versus maintenance or in terms of some of the legacy upkeep of technology, has changed very significantly. Overall, the money that is being spent in IT is actually increasing still and it is likely to increase for the next 5, 10 or 15 years," he said terming it a "huge opportunity".
The mix of where the client spends are being channelised, has shifted.
"Enterprises want greater efficiency in the traditional areas of spends, so application development maintenance coding...they would like to be able to see much better levels of efficiency out there and reduce the spend and that's why you're seeing some of the muted growth with some of the IT players. But there is a lot more spend happening on the infrastructure layer, on the AI layer, on cybersecurity and these are new areas that are opening up," Kapoor said. PTI MBI ANU
