The panic around AI wiping out Indian jobs might be misplaced. The real story is quieter, and in some ways more unsettling: the jobs are still there, but they're increasingly going to people who didn't lose the old ones.
A new analysis from Nomura, accessed by Bloomberg News, puts hard numbers behind a trend many in India's white-collar workforce have already sensed. AI is not thinning out the job market overall, it's splitting it in two.
The Hiring-Layoff Numbers Tell A Reassuring And Misleading Story
On paper, the data looks like good news. India logged 83,100 AI-related hires against 31,921 layoffs and attrition tied directly to the technology, a ratio of roughly 2.6 new roles for every one lost. If job creation were the only metric that mattered, this would be a straightforward win.
The study was done on 69 employment-related cases across Asia between 2022 and August 2026, and found that the two sides of that ratio barely overlap. The people being hired are rarely the people being let go.
Automated chatbots are absorbing the kind of routine customer-support work that once employed hundreds of thousands, even as IT services firms ramp up recruitment for a very different kind of employee: engineering graduates equipped to build and manage AI systems.
The Skills Gap Nobody's Retraining For
Here's the disconnect Nomura flags as the real problem: a customer-support executive whose role has been automated away cannot simply pivot into an AI engineering job. The openings emerging on the other side of this shift call for specialised degrees, technical depth, and years of hands-on experience — none of which a laid-off fresher typically has on hand.
That gap threatens something India's job market has quietly relied on for decades: the entry-level role as a training ground. Graduates would traditionally start in basic positions, learn the ropes of a company or industry, and work their way up. As AI absorbs more of that entry-level, repetitive work, companies are also stepping back from the mass hiring and on-the-job training that made this ladder possible in the first place. Increasingly, they want candidates who arrive with AI expertise already in hand, not ones they'll train from scratch.
Nomura describes the result as a two-tier labour market: soaring demand for experienced, specialised professionals sitting alongside a shrinking pipeline of opportunities for those just starting out.
A Regional Pattern, With India At Its Centre
Zoom out to Asia as a whole, and the shape of the trend holds. Nomura tracked 130,758 AI-related hires against 60,654 job losses across the region, over 90% of the hiring concentrated in the technology sector, while financial services accounted for roughly 60% of the cuts. India, China, and the Philippines, all home to major BPO hubs, carry the highest exposure to this shift.
Nomura is careful to note that its figures come from reported corporate cases, not a full census of every job created or lost across these economies. Even so, the direction of travel is hard to miss.
The Real Risk Isn't Job Loss
AI isn't emptying out India's job market. If anything, it's proving to be a net job creator, at least by the numbers. But numbers alone don't capture who actually benefits. For the fresher whose support role just got automated, or the entry-level employee watching training budgets shrink, the more pressing question isn't whether AI is creating jobs, it's whether the market still has a place for someone starting from zero.
Author’s Bio
Pragya Jha is an experienced journalist and copyeditor with over four years of experience covering news, technology, entertainment, celebrity culture, food, health, and lifestyle. She writes about everything from the latest news and tech developments to entertainment trends and food stories, with a focus on stories that inform, engage, and deserve a closer look.
