The NextMe Revolution: Xoriant’s bold bet on people amid AI disruption

A particular kind of organisational vertigo comes from doubling in size while trying to reinvent what work itself means. Xoriant, a 36-year-old digital engineering services firm, has spent the last three and a half years — growing from roughly 3,000 to more than 5,000 employees, absorbing four acquisitions, and attempting to answer a question that is quietly unsettling boardrooms across the technology services industry: what happens to a workforce when the skills it was hired for are being rewritten in real time by AI?

Most technology services firms are asking this question in the abstract. Xoriant has been forced to answer it in practice — under private equity ownership, mid-acquisition spree, at a moment when the definition of “AI-ready” changes almost by the quarter. The company’s response offers a useful case study precisely because it refuses easy narratives: it is neither a story of wholesale disruption nor of business-as-usual with an AI veneer bolted on. Instead, it's a story about infrastructure, sequencing, and restraint — about how a mid-sized organisation tries to move fast without breaking the very people it depends on.

Steering that response is Krupa NS, Chief Human Resources Officer at Xoriant since ChrysCapital’s acquisition of the company. She arrived with the experience this moment demands: nearly two decades at HCL Technologies exposed her to the mechanics of large-scale M&A across aerospace, telecom, automotive and industrial engineering. At STL, she helped scale Vedanta Group’s IT arm from near zero to a thousand people through acquisition. 

What she brings to Xoriant, then, is not theory but battle-tested foresight: an accumulated instinct for what breaks when organisations try to fuse people, systems and culture too quickly, or too slowly.

Xoriant’s story is, in its own way, a strategic tale about scale. Founded in the late 1980s as TekEdge, the company built its early identity by moving staffing workforces from India to the US, experimenting with product plays, and eventually settling into digital platform engineering services.

What changed under ChrysCapital’s ownership was not ambition but infrastructure. Krupa describes a company that still ran meaningful parts of its employee lifecycle — onboarding, performance management, the arc from entry to exit — on spreadsheets. Much of her mandate has been unglamorous but foundational: replacing Excel-based workflows with platforms, building custom tools where off-the-shelf solutions didn’t fit Xoriant’s specific operating rhythm, and making workforce data available “at the click of a button.” 

It is the kind of infrastructure work that rarely makes headlines but determines whether everything built on top of it — including an AI transformation — actually holds.

Four large acquisitions in three and a half years, with the latest just 10 months back, bringing in roughly 1,000 to 1,200 people, would strain the people function of any mid-sized firm. Krupa is candid that “seamless” integration is aspirational rather than achievable — there is, she insists, always a learning curve.

Her framework, refined across HCL’s mega-mergers and Xoriant’s smaller, faster ones, rests on a deceptively simple principle: people are the asset, not the afterthought. “In technology acquisitions, the primary asset being acquired is the people,” she says. “The valuation is fundamentally linked to the people we are bringing in. 

Technology, projects and other assets are secondary.” Losing acquired talent post-deal, in her framing, is not a soft HR failure — it is a direct erosion of the price paid.

Practically, this translates into due diligence that begins well before signatures are exchanged, mapping where cultures and processes align and where risk clusters. But the sharper insight is timing: Krupa argues for early cross-pollination—deliberately blending reporting lines within the first 90 days rather than letting an acquired unit operate as an island. 

Leaders from acquired companies are folded into the wider Xoriant structure quickly; internal evangelists are cultivated among the acquired workforce to carry the integration narrative peer-to-peer, rather than relying solely on top-down messaging.

Left too long in isolation, she warns, “a lot of thoughts and perceptions can creep into the minds of employees” — uncertainty calcifies into resistance. Her closing principle for this phase is almost a mantra: dignity and time. Anything imposed on people “can work momentarily, but it does not necessarily create sustainable integration.”

If M&A integration is Xoriant’s near-term operational priority, its AI transformation is the existential one — and Krupa’s articulation of it is unusually structured for an industry prone to buzzwords. She traces a three-stage evolution: traditional AI, generative AI, and now the shift toward agentic AI, a pace of change she describes as “extremely rapid.”

Xoriant’s response began roughly two and a half years ago with organisation-wide AI literacy — not confined to engineering, but extended to recruiters, HR business partners, analytics teams and enabling functions, pushed toward near-100% certification participation. But literacy, Krupa quickly clarifies, was only step one. The harder question that followed was an existential one for individual employees: “What’s in it for me?”

This is the thinking behind what Xoriant internally calls “the NextMe” — a structured attempt to map today’s roles onto tomorrow’s AI-native equivalents. Could a backend engineer or solution architect evolve into an agentic architect or orchestrator? Could a front-end developer become a deployment engineer for AI-driven systems? These aren’t rhetorical questions; they are the organising logic behind Xoriant’s reskilling architecture, which classifies capabilities into must-have, nice-to-have and good-to-have tiers, monitored by a network of roughly 300 internal mentors.

Crucially, Krupa rejects the idea that certification alone constitutes readiness. “Giving someone an online certification and saying, ‘Great, you’re AI-ready,’ is not sufficient,” she says. Employees need live exposure — real client projects and internal proofs-of-concept — layered on top of formal learning, particularly given that AI penetration varies sharply by sector; regulated industries like banking move at a different pace than less-constrained domains. By her own estimate, Xoriant is “currently around 25–30%” into this multi-year journey.

The most consequential structural change Krupa is driving is the quiet dismantling of traditional performance management. Relative ranking, forced distributions, ratings tied mechanically to increments — this architecture, she says plainly, “is no longer going to work.”

In its place, Xoriant is building what Krupa calls a Talent Value Index, weighted across three components: core project performance, AI readiness, and compensation positioned against live market benchmarks.

The intent is not to abandon delivery as a metric but to stop treating it as the only one. “We reward employees for what they deliver today,” she says, “but we want to reward them even better for their readiness for tomorrow.” It’s a subtle but significant reordering of incentives — one that, if executed with rigour, could become a template other mid-sized IT services firms watch closely.

Xoriant’s talent pipeline strategy has also been quietly rewritten. Rather than waiting for students to complete their final semester, the company now recruits from the seventh semester onward, embedding roughly 50 students at a time into six-month, eighth-semester internships at lower compensation but with concentrated training investment.

Close to 230 hires have come through this model to date, with Krupa reporting that performance—particularly in data and AI roles—has been “phenomenal,” noting that among the top performers in a recent Anthropic certification cohort, more than half had barely two years of post-college experience.

The logic is straightforward: faster time-to-billability, lower ramp-up cost, and a workforce that arrives already fluent in the organisation’s ways of working.

The house always welcomes you back

Underneath the frameworks, indices and acquisition playbooks sits something more intangible: Xoriant’s internal language of belonging. Functional communities are called “Houses” rather than practices, a deliberate choice meant to signal permanence amid constant project churn. — wherever an employee’s assignment takes them, Krupa says, “you always return to your House.” 

It is a small linguistic choice, but it reflects her broader thesis: that an organisation with employees who have stayed for twenty, even thirty years, cannot afford to let transformation erase the culture that built that loyalty in the first place.

“You cannot build culture for robots,” Krupa says. “You still have people.” In an industry racing toward agentic AI, redefined roles and compressed performance cycles, it may be the most quietly radical thing a CHRO can insist on.