GlobalLogic to Delink Headcount and Revenue, Says Asia Pacific Head Piyush Jha

US-based digital engineering services provider GlobalLogic is working on the “delineation” between revenue and headcount as artificial intelligence (AI) reduces the size of teams working on different projects. The company, owned by the Hitachi Group, employs the majority of its global workforce in the Asia Pacific region, particularly in India.

“We have started to experiment with the delineation between revenue and headcount,” Piyush Jha, Group Vice President & Managing Director – APAC at GlobalLogic told Outlook Business in an interview. “With AI, the teams are pretty fast getting smaller. Earlier, teams would be anywhere between eight and 10, 11 people, comprising a product owner, a scrum master and a tech lead, along with the rest of the team. Progressively, we are seeing teams that can deliver that very efficiently with four to five members.”

Jha is seeing a lot of role fusions, with employees increasingly developing full-stack skills.

Traditionally, IT firms’ revenue has been tied to the number of people they can deploy on a project. Their deals with enterprise clients would be linked to billing based on the people and time they provide. With the emergence of AI, enterprises have increasingly been demanding that IT vendors instead base deals on the outcome of a project.

Jha adds that in 2026, GlobalLogic will still post pretty strong growth, but “we will not post a very strong headcount growth because that is not in the interest of the employers, not in the interest of people at large”.

The delinking comes as the company has been going through an integration with Hitachi Digital Services (HDS), a global systems integrator and digital consultancy under the Japanese group. According to Jha, the combined entity’s headcount in APAC is close to 17,500 at this point and will exceed 21,000 by the end of the year. He says the company is increasingly working on upskilling its employees.

“Of the 17,500 people who operate here, close to 12,000 are now very comfortable with AI, and we are upskilling the rest of them pretty fast. My target is that by the end of the year, we will have over 90% of our staff AI-enabled and AI-ready, with some of them operating in AI-native ways,” he adds.

The integration of GlobalLogic and Hitachi Digital Services, announced in January 2026, will create an entity capable of offering end-to-end expertise across the digital transformation lifecycle for enterprises — from strategy planning, design and development to run operations — and will possess the capabilities to reliably integrate advanced digital technologies, including AI, into large-scale, mission-critical systems.

According to Jha, GlobalLogic and HDS bring very complementary skill sets to the table.

“We (GlobalLogic) have always prided ourselves on our digital product engineering capabilities and our prowess in bringing products to life. But GlobalLogic proper does not specialise in SRE, the run operations of systems or maintaining systems in the way that HDS does. We leave a lot of money on the table because we don’t do that,” Jha explains.

He adds that there were customers who might not have selected the company because they wanted a single window for operations across the entire process.

On August 23, the company announced that the combined entity would be led by Anand Birje starting September 1, 2026. Birje served as CEO of Encora, an AI-native digital engineering company, before its $2.35 billion acquisition by Coforge in April 2026.