At the turn of the millennium, India became the global hub for medical transcription. With fiber optic cables laid in the 1990s, American hospitals found it cheap and efficient to beam voice files across the ocean. Indian workers, fluent in English and medical terminology, turned dictations into polished reports overnight. The time-zone gap became an advantage: a surgeon in Boston could dictate before bed, and wake up to flawless notes typed in Bengaluru.
By the early 2000s, the industry seemed secure. Companies built training academies, invested in IT systems and promised young recruits that this was a career with a future.
But when I met Aakash (name changed) in June 2024, that promise had already unravelled. At 25, he was clinging to a short-term contract in a Bengaluru firm. He had joined a year earlier, after months of training. During recruitment, he asked the CEO whether AI posed a threat. ‘At least five years away,’ came the reassurance.
Yet, by March 2024, as the financial year closed, American clients began to vanish. Contracts were cancelled or shifted to automated platforms. Hundreds of jobs disappeared almost overnight. The cafeteria that once buzzed at 3 a.m. emptied out. Hiring froze; the recruitment team itself was laid off. New employees were brought in under “conditional retention training,” only to be dismissed weeks later (an accounting trick to show inflated headcounts to prospective clients) and workers lived in limbo. Economists have a phrase for jobs like Aakash’s: high exposure, low complementarity. Which means that these are roles where machines can easily take over, rather than raising the human’s capacity to work.
