- After seeing its Ebitda margin slid from just under 20% in FY22 to 16% in FY26, LTTS pivoted to offering AI-centred solutions
- CEO Amit Chadha says AI-focused deals now account for over 50% of the company’s projects
- To hop onto the AI bus, the company sold its low-margin SWC business at a Rs 350 crore loss
- Pivoting to AI. the firm says, has cut project timelines by 3-4X and reduced costs and headcounts by up to 30%
L&T Technology Services (LTTS) is betting the house on AI. Not entirely metaphorically.
In 2023, the engineering-services firm took over its parent’s Smart World and Communication’s (SWC) business with the aim of expanding its offerings across telecom, cybersecurity, and smart city projects. In September, it soldBseindiaDisclosure the business to Hyderabad-based AMI Paradigm Solutions for a shade over Rs 450 crore, booking a Rs 350 crore lossLTTSBusiness update. And SWC was no peripheral enterprise. At Rs 1,028 crore, it accounted for 10% of the company’s total revenue in FY25 and 7% of profit.
So, why sell?
LTTS is pivoting hard to AI-focused projects, which it calculates offer better returns than the low-margin segments such as smart city projects that SWC mainly caters to. It’s a small sample, but the results seem encouraging: over the last three quarters, the Ebitda margin has grown year-on-year from 17.5% in Q2 FY26 to 19.3% in Q2 FY27, while quarterly revenue has crossed Rs 3,000 crore.
The AI transition is already well underway. “Large-deal technology crossover ventures exceeded $200 million across segments, with AI-led deals accounting for more than 50% of the total,” CEO Amit Chadha reported on the Q2 FY27 earnings call this week.
One of which, for example, entails sorting out the data vault of a leading American refinery.
The refinery had expanded its plants over the past few decades, and its engineers found themselves sifting through reams of hand-annotated schematics, equipment datasheets, and maintenance logs every time they needed to fix a problem.
“If a pressure relief valve in the crude distillation unit malfunctions, an engineer must dig up the datasheet for its size and material and check whether later modifications changed the specifications, a process that can take days,” an LTTS executive said. “An AI-based platform like our Ainfonix structures all this data and simply suggests, in minutes, the right valve to use. The engineer just needs to review it.”
“Engineering intelligence” the company calls it. And it’s the beating heart of the reimagined business strategy that the L&T subsidiary is banking on to solve its margin problem.
Credits

L&T Tech took a Rs 350 cr haircut for the AI tag. Now it must prove the moat isn’t rented
Suprita Anupam
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