AI is taking India's jobs task by task while politicians count seats, columnist Shankkar Aiyar warns

AI job losses arrive task by task, long before the layoffs show up, and India's politicians are not watching, Shankkar Aiyar argues in his column for The New Indian Express, published on 3 October 2026. "AI does not take jobs. It takes over tasks first, and jobs follow," writes Aiyar, a journalist and the author of The Gated Republic and Accidental India. "Ten customer service agents are shrunk to two-plus AI. Five bookkeepers become one controller. Hiring freezes first, followed by headcount cuts." He lists the machines already at work: bots calling and closing loans at Bajaj Finance; AI agents at LimeChat and Haptik handling 95 percent of customer queries, which he says cuts staffing by four-fifths; a dark-factory lab set up in Pune by TCS, which has pared its campus intake; Salesforce trimming more than 4,000 jobs as it built its customer-service bots; and IBM's AskHR agent handling about 94 percent of routine HR tasks. For India, he says, the jobs most at risk are the ones a generation was told to chase, the BPO seat, the testing desk, the back-office ledger and the junior coder's cubicle: "In India, the pink slip is mostly an offer letter never sent." He cites Stanford Digital Economy Lab research finding employment of 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations about 19 percent below where it would have been. His charge is against governments. Anthropic's Dario Amodei warned in May 2025 that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs, and later told the UN Security Council that AI could be a risk to humanity; governments, Aiyar writes, took up the second warning and shrugged at the first. "It is easier to legislate against an apocalypse than to budget for a 22-year-old without a job." India's Parliament, he notes, spent its monsoon session debating how many members the Lok Sabha should have. Part of the column's job-risk map comes from Aiyar asking seven AI chatbots to rank occupations, which he describes himself; the employer cuts that companies have attributed to AI on the record are counted separately in this site's tracker.