I am in Hyderabad’s Hitec City, these days and I am ‘literally’ in the center of the IT, ITES workforce. And yes, I can feel a palpable frenzy around. If it’s not a ‘Darr ka Mahoul’ moment yet, it’s a close cousin definitely. Layoffs have hit hard, with over 100,000 jobs cut across global tech giants in 2025 alone. Precautions of all kinds are being followed with full zeal by the engineering folks whom I am friends or acquainted with. Both the employees and the employers are seeking a direction which is safe or low risk. On one hand the industry institutions and thought-leaders hail AI for the disruption, but on the other, it’s also being made the villain for leading the layoffs. As we find trusted answers in due time, will AI, as the new force, help the economy get prosperous and open new avenues for capital creation? While it takes away certain kinds of jobs, will it open doors for others? I’d say, we are witnessing a high-speed pivot.
Salesforce’s 8,000-person reduction, Amazon’s 14,000 cuts, Cisco shedding 4,000 roles and Microsoft’s consolidation of 10,000 roles have sent shockwaves through Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Pune. The cuts span homegrown giants like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro, as well as global firms such as Accenture, Oracle and IBM leaving thousands without jobs. But is it an apocalypse or evolution? History shows disruption gives birth to opportunity. McKinsey projects that AI could add $450-500 billion to India’s GDP by 2030, creating 20-50 million jobs in data annotation, prompt engineering, AI ethics, cyber security and sector-specific applications. The immediate picture is sobering. NASSCOM’s February 2026 report projects 1,80,000 – 2,20,000 net job displacements in traditional IT services over the next 18 months. But context matters: this represents 4.2% of India’s 5.2 million tech workforce. Those who treat this moment as reinvention rather than displacement will find that a digitising, consumption-led Indian economy has real capacity to absorb them, especially as AI itself lowers the cost of learning and accelerates cross-sector mobility.
Being a chronic optimist, I convince myself that AI will seep into the remaining 65% of India after the metros just like Jio, UPI, internet and e-commerce did. While metro India navigates AI displacement, 870 million Indians in tier-2/3 cities and rural areas remain digitally underserved. The government’s Digital India 2.0 framework, allocating ₹24,000 crore for AI-enabled public services, targets this gap. Subsequently, the various gaps existing in Education, Skilling, Healthcare, Banking, due to non-availability of capable personnel will now be rapidly removed.
As the Urban vs the rest of India gap continues to decrease, consumption will increase and strive for parity. It will open gates for Agriculture, GCC infrastructure, Healthcare, Manufacturing and Tourism. Now, all of these require skilled manpower and they’ll allow the currency to keep flowing and also creating wealth. I do foresee that the Indian economy is positioned for yielding growth on a very fertile ground. The Government and Private Institutions are building and providing the infrastructure where the youth and its custodians fast embrace and adopt AI. The union budget 2026-27 announcement last week is reassuring as it lays strong foundation for AI data centres and semiconductor ecosystem. The tax holiday till 2047 to boost global cloud and AI data centre investments in India will provide services to Indian customers through an Indian reseller entity. Such a policy push will boost AI reach to the last mile. With the right training, skilling, domain knowledge, it will lead to the state of a Knowledge Society that I envision.
I’ve grown up with Wodehouse and fantasized about having a Jeeves in our lives too. When I first laid my hands on AI, I told myself, ‘wow, this will upgrade us all to our 2.0 versions’. But at that time I also said that ChatGPT is a lazy Man-Friday, certainly not a Jeeves! Technologically, much is happening with the Gen AI models, even from the bell-curve standards. The mushroom-like releases of Claude, Gemini, Kimi, Perplexity, Copilot, Sonar, Grok, and their versions have kept us early-adopters occupied for a while now. Today, I can say that we may be quite close to summoning our own Jeeves. In fact with a monthly subscription we can continue to have a new one till we find our AI-soulmate.
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