HCLTech signs agentic AI partnership with Anthropic as advanced AI revenue jumps 78%

Published 2 days ago · 4 min read

HCLTech, India's third-largest IT services firm, signed a Global Premier Partnership with Anthropic on October 12 to accelerate enterprise adoption of agentic AI, and disclosed the deal the same day it reported record deal bookings for its second fiscal quarter. The timing was not incidental: the company is positioning its Anthropic relationship as a driver of the advanced AI revenue line it highlighted to investors hours later.

A dedicated business unit, not a reseller deal

Unlike a typical licensing or reseller arrangement, HCLTech is creating a standalone Anthropic Business Unit with its own Center of Excellence. The unit will build industry-specific agentic AI solutions on Claude, Cowork, and Claude Code, and will offer clients secure sandbox environments for enterprise Claude deployments, staffed by what the companies call forward-deployed engineers embedded directly with client teams. HCLSoftware, the company's software arm, also became an Anthropic independent software vendor partner, with plans to embed Claude into products including HCL BigFix and HCL AppScan. Claude and Claude Code are being folded into HCLTech's existing AI Force platform for IT support, code remediation, and digital employee services, with what the release describes as policy guardrails and human oversight for high-impact changes.

AI is only as useful as it is trustworthy, and this partnership reflects a shared commitment to advancing capability and safety together.

That line, from Anthropic co-founder and president Daniela Amodei, frames the deal around governance rather than raw model access, a positioning that tracks with Anthropic's broader enterprise pitch this year. HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar struck a similar note, saying the company combines "the scale of a global systems integrator with the product depth of an ISV," a pairing he argued strengthens its ability to deploy agentic AI at scale. Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the partnership, and HCLTech has not said how many client engagements or employees the new business unit will initially cover.

The earnings context

HCLTech's Q2 FY27 results, covering the quarter ended September 30, showed revenue of $3.7 billion, up 2.2% year over year, alongside new deal bookings of $3.3 billion, up 27% year over year and a first-half record. More notably for the AI narrative, the company's advanced AI revenue line reached $219 million for the quarter, up 28.4% sequentially and 78% year over year in constant currency, putting it on an $876 million annualized run rate. Net income hit ₹5,132 crore, the company's highest quarterly figure on record. CFO Shiv Walia attributed the quarter to "superior revenue growth with improved profitability," while Vijayakumar said the company's AI propositions are "resonating well with our clients." The earnings release did not break out how much of the advanced AI revenue, if any, is attributable to Claude-based work specifically, since the Anthropic partnership was only just signed.

The pairing illustrates a pattern now common among large systems integrators: tie a foundation-model partnership announcement to an earnings cycle to make an AI growth narrative concrete for investors, even where the revenue attribution is not yet cleanly separable. HCLTech joins a growing list of global IT services firms building dedicated practices around specific frontier labs, competing for the same enterprise governance and deployment budgets that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have each courted through systems-integrator channels this year.