India's IT sector, which has long been a pillar of the country's economic ambitions, faces the prospect of losing between 15 and 20 lakh jobs over the next five years due to the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, according to a report by government policy body NITI Aayog.
NITI Aayog's latest report titled 'Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy' was developed by its Frontier Tech Hub in collaboration with NASSCOM and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), with guidance from an expert council featuring leaders from IBM, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, LTIMindtree, and Teleperformance.
In a worst-case scenario, the report projects that headcount in India's tech services sector could fall from 7.5–8 million in 2023 to 6 million by 2031. The customer experience sector could shrink similarly, from 2–2.5 million to 1.8 million over the same period. That amounts to roughly one in four IT professionals losing their jobs within the decade. The report also notes that over 60 percent of formal sector jobs are susceptible to automation by 2030, particularly in IT and BPO.
NITI Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam put it bluntly, "If you do nothing, you are bound to lose jobs. Don't look at it as just 2 million jobs - those 2 million probably support an ecosystem of 20 to 30 million others."
The report is not entirely grim. NITI Aayog argues that up to 4 million new AI-enabled jobs could be created within five years if India adopts a coordinated national approach, and has proposed the launch of a National AI Talent Mission to position India as the AI workforce capital of the world by 2035.
