India is the world’s back office, and that makes it “ground zero” for measuring what AI does to work. Nomura economists Sonal Varma and Si Ying Toh set out the case in a report covered by Bloomberg. Its sheer scale means it feels the “largest absolute impact” across layoffs, hiring freezes and recruitment. And the recruitment is winning.
In India, the bank counted 83,100 AI-related hires between 2022 and this month, against 31,921 layoffs and attrition, more than two hires for every job lost. Across Asia the gap is wider still: 130,758 AI-related jobs added, over 90% of them in technology, versus 60,654 lost, around 60% of those in financial services, Business Today reported.
The catch beneath the headline
The finding, the economists wrote, “runs counter to the narrative of massive job losses due to growing AI adoption”. At least in the early stages, job creation is more than offsetting displacement. They see the same pattern in China and in the Philippines, where outsourcing anchors the labour market.
But the net number hides a harsh swap. The people let go are mostly support teams replaced by chatbots. The people hired are mostly IT-services graduates that firms credit directly to AI demand. “Since displaced workers rarely transition to AI engineering roles,” the economists warned, “the aggregates do mask distributional pain.”
