Bengaluru: HCLTech shares rose nearly 6% on the BSE on Friday after the IT firm announced a $1.1 billion mega deal with a Europe-based Fortune Global 50 enterprise, which sources told TOI is Mercedes-Benz. The agreement is among the largest AI-led deals announced by an Indian IT firm this year and underscores the growing scale of enterprise investments in AI.Some sources said Infosys previously handled parts of the engagement.The deal will see HCLTech establish an AI-driven operating model to transform and manage the automaker’s global digital workplace and enterprise network operations. The agreement runs from July 2026 through December 2031, with an option to extend it by another five years.HCLTech did not disclose the customer’s identity. When contacted by TOI, a Mercedes-Benz spokesperson declined to comment. “We kindly ask for your understanding that Mercedes-Benz does not comment on deal specifics,” the spokesperson said.The announcement comes just months after HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar said the company was seeing a healthy pipeline of large transformation deals despite macroeconomic uncertainty. Speaking after the March-quarter results in April, he said clients were increasingly moving beyond AI pilots and committing to enterprise-scale deployments focused on productivity gains and cost optimisation.At the same time, the company highlighted what it called “AI-led deflation,” estimating that AI-driven automation could reduce traditional revenue streams by 2-3% annually as projects require fewer people and become more efficient. While this is shrinking the size of conventional IT services contracts, HCLTech believes demand is shifting toward higher-value AI-led transformation programmes.To capture that opportunity, the company has been scaling its advanced AI portfolio, which has reached an annualised revenue run rate of $620 million. Management expects AI-native services to grow 25-30% in the near term, while AI-amplified businesses such as cloud, data and cybersecurity are expected to deliver double-digit growth.“The total contract value of net new bookings for the year clocked $9.3 billion, the same as last year, in spite of some of the AI deflation that you see in the TCV of net new bookings,” Vijayakumar had said during the April earnings call.HCLTech has also invested heavily in AI skills, training 135,000 employees in generative AI technologies, along with 11,800 AI builders and over 700 AI transformation black belts to support large-scale enterprise AI deployments.
