K Krithivasan, chief executive officer and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), saw his pay package increase by 6 per cent to ₹28.1 crore for the financial year ended March, from ₹26.5 crore a year earlier, as per the company’s latest annual report. Krithivasan, who is completing three years at the helm, had his salary increase to ₹1.67 crore for the financial year 2026 from ₹1.39 crore. Besides this, he earned ₹1.43 crore in benefits, perquisites, and allowances, and ₹25 crore in commission. His pay ratio to median remuneration of employees is 332.8. The CEO’s pay hike is almost in line with the wage increases TCS paid to its employees last year. The average annual increase for junior and mid-level employees was in the range of 4.5-7 per cent, with top performers receiving double-digit increments in India. However, during the course of the year, the total increase was in the range of 5-8 per cent after accounting for promotions and other event-based compensation revisions. Junior and mid-level employees outside India received a wage increase between 1-6 per cent. “The increase in remuneration is in line with the market trends in the respective countries. In order to ensure that remuneration reflects the company’s performance, the variable pay is also linked to organisation performance and individual utilisation in addition to individual performance,” TCS said in the report. The percentage increase in the median remuneration of employees in the financial year was 5.1 per cent. TCS had 584,519 employees on its rolls as of March. Chief operating officer Aarthi Subramanian earned a total of ₹18.3 crore in remuneration, which included ₹1.5 crore in base salary, ₹1.83 crore in benefits, perquisites and allowances, and ₹15 crore in commission. Krithivasan, in his letter to shareholders, described the current ecosystem as an “increasingly complex macro-economic and geo-political environment”. He also said FY26 marked an inflection point for enterprise artificial intelligence (AI). “For the first time since GenAI emerged in 2023, customers moved decisively from pilots to scaled deployments. AI became central to every conversation and every solution, accelerating adoption across industries.” Chairman N Chandrasekaran said while the last fiscal year began with expectations of steady global growth, soft inflation and easier financial conditions, the start of the West Asia crisis has brought rising concerns about stagflation — falling output coupled with rising inflation. “As AI scales, key aspects of trust, security, and data sovereignty will be non-negotiable. Enterprises will need an AI Operating System. This Operating System will be a foundation of infrastructure, data, models, context, agents, and governance. Building it demands deep industry expertise, partnerships, and a clear understanding of enterprise context,” he added.