Driving Ireland’s digital future
Deepak Chaudhari, Country Head for Ireland at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), speaks with Joshua Murray about the company’s expanded Irish footprint, its growing role in national transformation programmes, and how cloud, AI, and regional talent development are shaping Ireland’s digital future.
More than two decades after TCS first established an Irish presence, the company’s trajectory has entered a new phase. Deepak Chaudhari explains that TCS’ earliest operations in Ireland were primarily designed to support global contracts that required an Irish delivery component.
“TCS started its journey 20 years back, but the real growth started only in the last six years, where we focused on a number of local brands and local businesses that we could invest into and focus towards.”
This pivot toward Irish clients spanning the sectors of financial services, the public sector, insurance, and more has significantly expanded the company’s footprint. “We have been working with a number of national brands for their technology needs and business operations, and as a key milestone, in 2020 we invested to create a global delivery centre in Letterkenny, which gave us a further boost in terms of our geographical presence. We are now serving more than 50 customers in Ireland across several industry segments, providing associates with the opportunity to work on new customer projects and expand their knowledge base.”
Regionalisation
Choosing Letterkenny as the site of TCS’ major delivery centre marked an important strategic departure from industry norms. Chaudhari outlines why it was the right choice.
“Letterkenny gives us a unique advantage,” he explains. “First, it gives our people a good work-life balance. It also matches the drive that IDA has to go out of Dublin. It gives us access to talent across the region, rather than fighting for talent in the top cities within Ireland.”
He describes the Letterkenny facility as “a fantastic modern setup”, with infrastructure “of absolute top standards”, enabling teams based there to support national and international clients. “It benefits people working there to get global opportunities while working in a remote site,” he adds.
The regional investment, he stresses, is not a symbolic gesture but the backbone of TCS’ delivery capability. “Local investments really have helped to serve the country, because it is only through those investments that such large programmes of work can be delivered.” TCS currently employs over 1,000 people in Ireland, with 80 per cent of them being locally employed.
‘Global expertise to local challenges’
Chaudhari describes his core purpose as “bringing global experiences and delivering them locally”. With TCS operating across major sectors worldwide, the company’s ambition is to ensure that Irish organisations benefit from the scale and capabilities developed across its global network.
“TCS has been working with top clients across different sectors, and we have a lot of expertise, experience, capabilities, and scale available,” he says. “My focus is to ensure that TCS is at the forefront of any discussions that take place for initiatives clients want to take, whether it be growth and transformation, cost optimisation, or innovation.”
Ireland, he asserts, is an attractive market because of its collaborative innovation ecosystem. “It is wonderful to do business here,” he says. “Ireland brings together academic institutes, innovation funding, and an excellent ecosystem of national and international brands, all supported by strong government backing through IDA. That gives companies a great advantage to be based here.”
AI a ‘board-level priority’
TCS has declared its global ambition to become the world’s largest AI-enabled technology services organisation, an ambition with direct relevance to its operations in Ireland.
“TCS has set its goal to be the world’s largest AI-enabled organisation,” Chaudhari says. “We have invested a lot in training our associates, providing AI tools, and engaging with clients with different proof of concepts and intelligent architecture designs.”
He emphasises that AI interest is broad and accelerating. “AI is a board-level agenda across different sectors. We have seen clients at different stages of evaluation, and they are in discussions with TCS to look at proven skills and available models.”
Rather than being industry-specific, he observes that demand tends to follow functional needs. “It is across industries, but it is much more functional-driven than industry-driven. Back-office areas, for example, are where we see much more prominence.”
TCS has developed industry-wide libraries of AI use cases, allowing clients to “pick and choose different AI models that could be applicable”.
Pensions auto-enrolment
One of TCS’s most significant engagements is its role in delivering and operating the pensions auto-enrolment system on behalf of the Department of Social Protection, a programme Chaudhari describes as a “national dream for decades”.
“It is going to help the financial wellbeing of several hundred thousand Irish workers. Pensions auto-enrolment only picked up momentum in the last few years, and TCS was selected as a partner after a very lengthy government procurement process.”
The company is drawing on its experience supporting the UK’s National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) and private pension providers. “We are bringing our global experiences and deploying them for the Irish needs for the pension schemes,” he explains. “From Letterkenny, we have been supporting NEST as well, and this adds to our portfolio of activities in pensions auto-enrolment.”
For Chaudhari personally, the programme is an opportunity for TCS to demonstrate how large, complex national systems can be delivered effectively. “We want to make sure it is well echoed that TCS can take up large, strategic national programmes of work and deliver them on time, within budget, and at the best quality possible,” he says.
The programme’s importance goes beyond technology. “By the time employees retire, they will have a well-invested pension to support them and mean that they are not relying only on the state pension. It is a very meaningful initiative, and we are proud of our role in bringing that to people in Ireland.”
Cloud
Cloud transformation and automation are key areas where TCS is seeing accelerating demand, and the company is investing heavily in graduates entering these areas. “We hire graduates from ATU in Letterkenny and Sligo, from Galway, and from Northern Ireland. They get trained early in their careers and these are long-term, sustainable investments in people.”
Tooling and automation are becoming increasingly important. “We are seeing a desire for AI to help weed out the noise in threat categories, to understand what needs human attention versus what can be dealt with by AI or automation.”
Cloud transformation is deeply connected to these efforts. “We are seeing cloud-only projects now. Some clients have no traditional infrastructure at all; everything is designed, deployed, and supported in the cloud.”
Chaudhari says that many organisations are still in early stages of cloud adoption. “There is a desire to go to cloud, but the leap has not been taken by many companies in a very big way. We can help clients take that leap.”
People and culture
Despite the technology focus, Chaudhari is emphatic about the role of people. “People are our biggest asset,” he says. “TCS has always believed in investing in talent.”
Learning is central to the company’s approach. “There is a lot of focus on learning, and employees enjoy vast learning opportunities,” he explains. “We provide time and support for learning and open up different opportunities across roles and progression paths.”
Mobility across industries and clients is encouraged. Community engagement also features strongly. “Involving employees in community initiatives and engaging programmes creates a vibrant ecosystem where our people can excel.”
This culture of development and empowerment, he says, is key to TCS’ ability to deliver large-scale transformation.
Long-term ambition
Looking ahead, Chaudhari states that his long-term ambition for TCS in Ireland is to “collaborate with all the national brands within Ireland for their strategic digital roadmaps”.
“In the public sector, there is a lot of legacy architecture and technical debt. TCS wants to be the partner that enables organisations to move to cloud, adopt AI, innovate, and achieve more efficient operations.”
For global organisations based in Ireland, the ambition is no different: “We want to support their global ambitions, either through Ireland or through their wider roles.”
What differentiates TCS, he believes, is its ability to scale, its sustained investment in regions like Letterkenny, and its openness to partnership. “Come and talk to us,” he says. “If you have an idea or a project, we are open to discussions about how we can help.”
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