“Several hundred” ServiceNow Expert Services staff are being transferred to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), according to reports. Workers are said to have discovered they would undergo a Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment (TUPE) to TCS.
There has also been some reaction from the ServiceNow community online, with a Reddit thread calling the move ‘layoffs in everything but name’. Dan Wells, CEO of ServiceNow recruitment network Linking Humans, revealed the news on LinkedIn.
Managing Headcount… Again
We asked ServiceNow about the news, and a spokesperson told NowBen:
“ServiceNow is committed to having the right talent in the right roles, and that means making necessary changes to how we are structured.
“We are driving efficiencies across the business, actively investing in and hiring for AI-focused skills, and managing headcount with discipline to end 2026 where we started, as we shared earlier this year. That’s how we grow sustainably and win.”
This is an identical statement to the one provided when another wave of global layoffs at ServiceNow was revealed in July this year.
And that statement was itself an adaptation of an earlier version provided during a previous wave of layoffs the previous month. The earlier statement said that ServiceNow, “like any company of our size… continuously evaluates our organization”.
More Bad News for Software Workers?
The news could be interpreted as another blow for ServiceNow employees, who have already undergone two waves of layoffs earlier this year.
The wider tech industry too has been taking a hit. According to tracking website layoffs.fyi, nearly 130,000 tech employees have been laid off across 300 companies in 2026 alone. We are only three-quarters of the way through the year, but this has already surpassed the 122,000 from 2025.
But it could also be argued that having your role transferred to another company is not nearly as big of a blow as losing it outright. You haven’t really lost your job, you’ve just got a new manager.
That being said, the people working at ServiceNow are working there because they applied to work there, and that’s where they’ve built their careers and networks. For some, the culture at ServiceNow might have been a selling point – while TCS may not hold that same appeal to them, even if the job description remains the same.
Questions have also been raised over what happens to staff RSUs when they transfer to TCS.
It’s also worth considering why ServiceNow would make such a move. An enterprise software company of this size might want to focus its efforts more towards its own software and products, rather than services/consultation.
ServiceNow sells the platform; TCS (and others) increasingly do the implementation and transformation work. The aim might be to allow ServiceNow to focus its own professional-services resources on areas where direct involvement is particularly valuable.
Final Thoughts
It’s the third instance of 2026 where we’re reading that ServiceNow is “making necessary changes” to how it is structured. The tech sector as a whole is changing, and ServiceNow is no exception to that.
We’ve seen talk of a ‘SaaSpocalypse’, and whether that holds true in the long-run for traditional enterprise software vendors really remains to be seen, but employees at these companies are certainly feeling the pain of all this “headcount management”.
NowBen will continue to monitor and provide updates about this developing situation.