LTIMindtree's Lambu to focus on agility, AI & cost efficiency

BENGALURU: LTIMindtree CEO designate Venu Lambu has unveiled a fit-for-future strategy that refines its strategic direction focusing on three key vectors: increasing agility, simplifying processes, and establishing new baseline metrics for operational costs.
“Leaders are rallying behind the next S curve, and we're accelerating towards preparing ourselves for faster growth. However, the future model needs to be flattened and agile. Additionally, it should have cost models that our clients expect us to be more competitive. We are re-baselining some of the cost of doing business and cost of delivery. It’s not a cost exercise, but it's about getting fitter to adapt to newer business models, newer demands, and opportunities,” Lambu said. The S-curve demonstrates a growth trajectory that begins at a gradual pace, experiences a swift acceleration, and plateaus at the end.

In fact, the current CEO Debashis Chatterjee describes it as an orderly transition. "We don't want to lose the momentum that we have, which means that the new CEO who is going to be coming in has to have ideally some familiarity with the environment and the system. As we go into the next phase of growth, the new CEO should be based in the market, not in India," suggesting that Lambu's return was a strategic choice for the leadership position. The company has over $4 billion in revenue and employs 86,000 people.
Lambu is avoiding making large-scale changes to the organisational structure. He believes in adding more firepower to its AI-led offerings by infusing AI into the core business and building a dedicated business unit with a new leader to deliver AI services. “Our core services, whether in digital engineering or enterprise apps, are undergoing their own evolution because of AI. It is very important that we infuse AI into these practices. I added more speed and focus to this by enabling our core practices through an AI infusion model. Importantly, you can pass on the productivity gains and differentiate yourself from competitors and deliver enhanced value to customers,” he said.
Lambu said the second strategic approach focuses on dedicated AI services, encompassing Agentic AI and its underlying business processes, whilst incorporating our fundamental data capabilities, language model development, and AI infrastructure support. “This will expand our addressable spend beyond the CIO budget. But it's also about pivoting, getting some investment dollars, and putting them into pure play AI services so that we get an opportunity to widen our addressable spend,” he added.
He said the integration of AI in service delivery enables a re-evaluation of governance control mechanisms. “I'm already working on revisiting this span of control. When you address that, it flattens to some extent. Due to pureplay AI services, you will see a convergence of industry expertise both vertical and technology. This provides an opportunity to avoid creating multiple teams trying to solve one problem. You can create one team with multiple skill sets to solve the problem,” he said.
Chatterjee said Lambu shares the company's vision of reaching their ambitious revenue target of $10 billion by 2032. “One of the reasons why we set the aspiration is we believe that we must scale as we go along. There's no point trying to be subscale. We don't want to lose the agility, nor the customer focus. What is working well stays. I think clients are appreciative of the fact that this is an orderly transition.”