Fewer tech professionals are sitting on the bench—but those who are, are more restless than ever. TCS’ move to slash average bench time to just 35 days signals a seismic shift in how India’s IT giants are rethinking workforce strategy in the age of AI. As India’s IT giants compress bench time and shift to leaner, on-demand staffing models, experts warn of rising attrition and growing employee frustration amid a changing talent landscape.

Bench strength is now minimal across most IT companies, with the focus now on skill-based redeployment, innovative projects and contingent workforce, said Neeti Sharma, CEO of TeamLease Digital. Companies with higher bench strength are not hiring for lateral positions in numbers, prioritising utilisation of existing talent before new hires.

Compared to 2020, with the average time for an IT professional on the bench reducing to about 30-45 days as compared to 45-60 days in 2020-21, twice as many people are job-hunting now, she said.

However, while the absolute number of professionals on the bench has reduced in the last 18 months, the ones on the bench are also looking for newer opportunities, more interesting work and chances to grow and improve their pay structures.

“Prolonged benching negatively impacts key metrics at IT services firms. Margins are reduced due to the high cost of maintaining unutilised employees, especially in a competitive pricing environment. Utilisation rates—a critical metric for measuring the percentage of billable resources—decline, signalling inefficiency in workforce management. Prolonged bench periods can lead to voluntary attrition, as employees on the bench often feel underutilised and may seek opportunities elsewhere. This increases recruitment and training costs for firms,” Biswajeet Mahapatra, Principal Analyst, Forrester, explained.

With the rise of digital transformation and agile methodologies, firms are focusing on reducing idle resources or bench strength and instead, are optimising costs by hiring skilled professionals on-demand or engaging freelancers for specific projects, he observed.

This shift enables firms to remain flexible, improve efficiency and quickly adapt to changing client needs, while also reducing overhead costs associated with maintaining a large bench.

Alongside, professionals who have upskilled themselves on skills such as AI, ML, cloud, cybersecurity, and DevOps have minimal bench time due to the high demand.

“This will be more a reflection of slower present demand and preparedness for any comeback of demand. It can also be a matter of preparedness for the preference of offshoring, where the event of ongoing projects might be seeing effort mix its shift to offshore. With the rise in AI adoption, the overall benching strategy will see more compression. It becomes a matter of not just margin management, but also the optics of implementing successful AI internally,” said Prashant Shukla, vice president of Everest Group.

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Published on June 22, 2025