The much-feared job losses in the tech sector are here. About 300-450 jobs are being lost each day across the world, according to estimates compiled by multiple headcount trackers. Before Microsoft’s recent announcement of offering voluntary exit to 60,000 employees worldwide, including 23,000 in India, Oracle was in the spotlight for letting go of 12,000 employees in the country. Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Netflix and Salesforce, too, have been in the news for net retrenchments.
By most measures, the tech layoffs this year are lower than those seen in 2023, when about 2.65 lakh lost their jobs. But the worrying news is that more cuts are expected in the next six months because companies are increasing investments on AI infrastructure and restructuring ahead of larger transitions.
For India, which derives the largest number of white-collar jobs from the tech sector, the anticipated AI jobs apocalypse has not arrived yet. When it does, the impact will be widely felt. The first round of significant headcount losses is occurring in back-office roles, with global banks like Standard Chartered, HSBC and Barclays announcing plans to reduce such roles in the coming years. Although Indian majors TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Tech have not joined the aggressive firing bandwagon, their net additions were stymied in the July-September quarter.
TCS CEO K Krithivasan has sought to nuance doomsday predictions like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s claim of an imminent global white-collar wipe-out. But India cannot altogether escape the industry upheaval. Most unfortunately, it is arriving when the most populous nation’s young workforce is bulging, with 30-40 crore fresh workers expected to enter the workforce by 2030. There is no bigger headache than this for policy makers.
It’s time the government and the industry got their act together. At a time leaders like Krithivasan are talking about the need to reorient tech roles, most engineering curriculums remain way out of date. The government must institute regional coordination mechanisms for academic institutions and industry players to close the education-to-jobs skills gap. While the adoption of AI is accelerating, the technology’s promised impact on worker productivity is not yet significant. It’s time for companies to use this transitional phase to upskill their existing workforces. What’s being done is too little, rolling at too slow a pace. There is no time to be lost.
