The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) could lead to as many as two million job losses in India’s tech sector which employs about eight million people, but it could also create four million new job roles over the next five years, according to a NITI Aayog report released on Monday.
“(If) you do nothing… you are bound to lose jobs. Don’t look at it as just 2 million jobs as those 2 million probably support an ecosystem of 20 to 30 million others, as their income moves through the economy, with demand for both goods and services, and creates sustenance for many more,” NITI Aayog Chief Eexecutive Officer (CEO) BVR Subrahmanyam said.
“Are you going to be minus 2 million, or are you going to go above 8 million to 10 to 12 million? We can go up or down… Job profiles are changing, the nature of expertise is changing, processes will change. So massive changes are coming,” he emphasised.
To turn disruption into opportunity, the NITI Aayog has recommended the launch of a National AI Talent Mission as a nationally coordinated effort to make India the AI workforce capital of the world. The report “Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy”, developed by the Aayog’s Frontier Tech Hub with NASSCOM and BCG, has recommended close collaboration between this proposed AI Talent Mission and the ongoing India AI Mission, along with partnerships between academia, government and industry to forge trained talent into innovators and researchers.
Referring to the recent widespread worries about significant job cuts at a large IT company, the CEO said that the company has now reported nearly 20,000 job cuts in the last quarter. “And it’s going to get repeated next quarter. Let’s not shy away from it. Are you going to be static? Where the new hirings going to be?” he asked.
Recalling a recent convocation he addressed at a middle level engineering college, Subrahmanyam said he saw blank faces in the audience as the days of entire batches of students being hired by IT majors are a thing of the past.
“In some places, 60% of the class was not placed last year. And the placement faculty was chasing companies and alumni to urge them to hire one guy… The ripple effect is happening. So there is a need to actually act,” the CEO stressed.
While he urged Nasscom and other industry bodies to help existing tech workers reskill in order to adapt to the AI-induced landscape changes, Subrahmanyam said: “India’s strength lies in its people. With over 9 million technology and customer experience professionals, and the world’s largest pool of young digital talent, we have both the scale and ambition. What we need now is urgency, vision, and coordination.”
Based on guidance from an expert council of industry leaders from firms such as IBM, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, LTIMindtree, Teleperformance, the report sets out India’s path to becoming a trusted global AI workforce and innovation partner
by 2035. “The difference between job loss and job creation depends squarely on the choices we make today. This roadmap provides a clear, actionable path to ensure India becomes the global epicentre of AI talent by 2035,” said Debjani Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow, NITI Aayog.