The more AI can do your job, the safer it may be

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:00)
For the past two years, one of the biggest fears around AI and work has been that the jobs most exposed to the technology would face the greatest pressure.
India seemed particularly vulnerable. Its technology industry, one of the country's biggest export businesses, and its workforce have been built around software development, engineering, and other forms of knowledge work. NASCOM had estimated that India's tech sector would reach about $315 billion in revenue in the financial year ending in March 2026, with employment coming close to 6 million people. But warnings from the AI industry itself have been stuck. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had warned that AI would eventually eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs. Goldman Sachs had estimated that generative AI could expose an equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs globally to automation. For India, this raises an obvious concern. Software developers and other technical workers spend their days doing work that generative AI is increasingly capable of helping with. So you might expect these workers to be among the first to feel the pressure. But a survey of more than 1500 India-based professionals conducted by the workplace platform called Blind in July, the results of which came out last week, offers a different picture of where this anxiety is concentrated. It found that 66% of people in AI and machine learning expected layoffs or significant headcount cuts in their teams within three to six months. Among engineers, 24% said that such cuts were likely the lowest share for that measure among the functions surveyed. Now, these are just expectations of people, not actual layoffs. But they tell us something about where workers themselves see the risk. And then there is another piece of evidence that's quite interesting. You see, in February ICRIER, which is a think tank based in India, published a study based on a survey of 651 IT firms across 10 Indian cities conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 But before we get any further into the study, I have an important disclosure. The study was supported by OpenAI, which is a company with an obvious interest in how the employment effects of AI are understood. However, the study is worth reading carefully, rather than just dismissing it or accepting it at face value. Because its findings are quite striking.
It found that the occupations with the highest exposure to generative AI, which is software developers, app developers, database designers, and statisticians were also the occupations where companies reported the strongest growth in demand. Basically, software-related divisions saw the least moderation in employment. And the biggest hiring pressure was actually at the entry level.
So, the labor market in India is sending out some contradictory signals. Technical workers are becoming more exposed to AI, but companies continue to want their skills. And hiring is slowing down across the sector, but AI-related hiring is growing. And the pressure is particularly visible among people trying to get their first job. So, why does the demand for technical workers still persist even though AI is taking on more and more of their work?
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Snigdha Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 18th of August.
So let's start with the fear itself. The ICRIER study gives some numbers to it. Statisticians and mathematicians had an average AI exposure score of 3.86 on a five-point scale. App developers scored 3.39, database designers scored 3.32, and software developers and analysts scored 3.18. Now these are among the occupations where generative AI has made some of its fastest progress. Coding is the office example. AI tools can generate code, explain it, identify errors and handle parts of the software development process itself. That changes the economics of work. Companies are responding by hiring for some of the skills needed to use that technology. Naukri data, which was reported by Reuters, showed AI hiring in India's IT sector rose 16% year on year in June, even as overall IT recruitment fell by 3%.
Across 14 sectors, AI and machine learning jobs rose 25%.
Naukri's parent company InfoEdge said that demand was increasingly focused on specialized and senior talent.
This shift has been building for a while. Between January 2023 and March 2025, AI-related job postings more than doubled as a share of all listings from 2.9% to 6.5%.
And demand for AI skills grew 75% faster than for other roles. Now all of this is happening against a broader slowdown. TCS chairman N Chandrasekharan who recently stepped down said in June that the company was moving towards having an equal number of AI agents and human employees and expected AI to reduce the pace of hiring even as the company continued to employ people.