Axis Bank plans to increase campus hiring to between 12,000 and 12,500 employees in FY27, up from around 11,500 to 11,600 recruits in FY26, as it builds its early-career talent pipeline while reassessing roles affected by AI and automation.
The increase comes despite a decline in the bank’s overall employee strength. Axis Bank ended FY26 with 101,337 employees, down from 104,453 a year earlier, a net reduction of 3,116.
Yet the bank hired 31,665 employees during FY26. The combination of substantial hiring and lower year-end headcount points to considerable movement within the workforce rather than a simple hiring slowdown.
According to Rajkamal Vempati, group head-HR, Axis Bank continues to invest in early-career talent even as technology changes the nature of work across the organisation.
AI and automation are increasingly taking over repetitive transaction-processing and lower-level operational activities. The bank, however, is not treating every automated task as a position to be eliminated. It is reviewing vacancies before replacing departing employees and looking at opportunities to redeploy people as requirements change.
At the same time, demand is shifting towards work that depends more heavily on human judgement, customer relationships and specialist expertise. Commercial banking, wealth management, MSME banking, risk, compliance, audit and cybersecurity are among the areas receiving greater talent attention. Relationship-management roles remain particularly important because they depend on customer understanding and trust.
Internal mobility has become a significant part of that workforce recalibration. Axis Bank says around 65 per cent of employee movement now happens internally, compared with what it estimates to be an industry average of 25 to 30 per cent.
The bank has also reduced the minimum period employees need to spend in a role before applying for an internal opportunity from three years to 16 months. Its AI-enabled career platform, Thrive, matches employees with vacancies based on their skills and experience.
Attrition, meanwhile, declined to 22.4 per cent in FY26 from 25.5 per cent in FY25.
Axis Bank is also deploying AI within employees’ existing roles. Its Siddhi platform uses customer information to generate targeted prompts for employees, while other AI systems analyse customer interactions to support productivity and decision-making.
Interestingly, technology specialists will account for only a small proportion of the expanded campus intake. Of the planned 12,000 to 12,500 recruits, only around 150 to 200 are expected to be hired for technology roles. Most will enter business, customer-facing and governance functions.
That hiring mix offers a clearer picture of the workforce shift underway at the bank. AI may be changing how work gets done, but Axis Bank’s response is not simply to hire more technologists. It is simultaneously bringing in young talent, moving existing employees internally and concentrating hiring on roles where customer relationships, judgement and specialist knowledge remain important.
