HCLTech to Focus on AI for Telecom at MWC

HCLTech's focus on AI for telecommunications is backed by significant investment, including its recent acquisition of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Telco Solutions business for up to $160 million. This deal absorbed 1,500 engineering and telecom specialists and crucial IP for AI-led closed-loop network automation. The company is expanding its ecosystem through strategic partnerships. It recently teamed up with Circles to inject AI into its SaaS platform for telecom operators and is a key technology partner for the GSMA's Open Gateway initiative, aiming to create "Network as a Platform" models. At MWC, HCLTech will demo specific applications like AIOps, Agentic AI-based Operations Support Systems (OSS), and AI-driven "Contact Centre as a Service" platforms. This aligns with a major industry shift away from simple conversational AI towards "agentic AI" that can autonomously manage network tasks like provisioning services or resetting ports. This push into AI is already impacting the company's bottom line. In the second quarter of the 2026 fiscal year, HCLTech became the first top-tier Indian IT firm to report its standalone AI revenue, which exceeded $100 million for the quarter. The competitive landscape is heating up as well. HCLTech competes with global firms like Accenture and IBM, and other Indian IT giants such as Infosys and Wipro. Notably, competitor Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has also revealed major AI ambitions, with plans to build a 1 GW AI data center in India. The broader industry context is a massive surge in AI-driven data traffic, which is reshaping network dynamics. Generative AI applications are creating more continuous, two-way traffic flows, driving urgent investment in scalable fiber backbones and dense metro fiber networks to support distributed AI architectures.