AIs New Workforce Is Here The Question Is Whether Humans Are Ready for Their New Coworkers

LTIMindtree, one of India’s largest IT firms, has quietly assembled a workforce few enterprises have the courage to attempt: a team of 1,500 AI “digital employees” equipped with autogenerated faces, employee IDs, defined responsibilities, and human managers who train and supervise them. If the agents fail to learn or meet expectations, they can be retired or effectively “fired,” just like any underperforming software asset.

The system is not a gimmick. It is already integrated deeply into finance, infrastructure operations, customer service, HR, and even the CEO’s office. These digital employees process invoices, handle onboarding compliance checks, send payment notifications, and provide sales teams with fast access to case studies. They function inside LTIMindtree the way human team members do, but with unlimited capacity and no need for breaks or vacation time.

CEO Venu Lambu says the strategy is beginning to break one of the hardest constraints in traditional IT services: the linear relationship between revenue and headcount. In the first half of FY26, the company added more than $64 million in incremental revenue while experienced headcount actually declined by nearly 1,900 employees. Lambu expects the next five years to continue this pattern. Revenue could double, he says, while headcount grows only modestly.

Underlying this shift is a major redesign of how work is distributed. Freshers are being assigned to infrastructure roles once dominated by experienced hires. Managers are now responsible for teams that include both human employees and digital employees. Operational layers once reliant on manual oversight are being collapsed and rebuilt around more autonomous systems.

Lambu calls these agents digital employees rather than bots because he wants teams to think of them as contributors with expectations and accountability. “My AI agents will not replace people. I am getting digital employees whose managers are human employees,” he told Moneycontrol.

The broader market context supports his optimism. Lambu says demand visibility for 2026 is improving as clients shift budgets toward modernization and AI readiness. Vendor consolidation, early AI factory initiatives, and pressure to reduce operating costs are pushing enterprises to treat automation not as an add-on but as an operating model change.

Still, LTIMindtree’s experiment raises a deeper question about where this trend leads. If AI agents are becoming employees in all but name, how do enterprises build systems that can govern them responsibly and safely? And who ensures that human workers benefit from this shift rather than being sidelined by it?

That is exactly where NewRocket’s Sean Iannuzzi enters the conversation. As Global AI CoE Practice Lead, he argues that digital employees are only useful when enterprises build the oversight, identity, and accountability layers required to make autonomy safe.

“Digital employees are not another wave of automation; they represent a new layer of operational intelligence,” Iannuzzi says. “They operate across systems, learn from outcomes, and act within defined guardrails of trust and accountability.”

According to Iannuzzi, enterprises have squeezed every possible efficiency from traditional optimization. Workflows have been streamlined, toil has been chipped away, and processes have been standardized. Yet the ceiling remains: humans can only coordinate so fast, hand off so cleanly, and absorb so much complexity.

This is why he believes digital employees are becoming the next great lever of enterprise productivity. Unlike copilots, which assist an individual, or traditional bots, which follow fixed logic, digital employees can act as participants inside IT, HR, finance, compliance, and customer service operations. They carry identity, follow rules, escalate issues, and can complete multi-step tasks without human micromanagement.

“This shifts the limits of what an enterprise can achieve,” he says. “Progress is no longer defined by human bandwidth. It is defined by how effectively digital employees and humans collaborate to create outcomes neither could deliver alone.”

That collaboration is the hinge point. Companies that treat digital employees as magic will fail. Companies that treat them as coworkers, with clear oversight and responsibility structures, are positioned to compete at a level most organizations cannot yet imagine.

LTIMindtree is already proving what that future looks like. NewRocket argues that the rest of the industry will need to learn the governance piece or risk falling behind. Either way, 2026 is shaping up to be the year companies stop talking about digital employees and start working alongside them.