Fifty thousand IT jobs were lost last year, and many more are expected to vanish as fear of AI adoption and its disruptive nature grips IT industry workers. This is especially true in India’s Silicon Valley, which recently witnessed massive IT job losses, including mass sackings at Infosys that made headlines across the country.

Recent media reports speak of further layoffs in the IT and ITES sectors, especially affecting lower-rung programmers and software testers, triggering fresh fears among workers. A few instances of falling rentals are being attributed to this job loss scenario, but IT top honchos and experts dismiss this as far from the truth.

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IT top honchos, however, have a different take—one that offers great reassurance to the hundreds of thousands of young tech graduates migrating to India’s IT hubs, including Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, and Noida. They assert that there is no need to fear AI-driven disruptions.

Mohandas Pai, the multi-faceted IT and management guru, offers a reassuring perspective. He believes India’s IT sector will continue to grow—contrary to the view that AI will wipe out jobs. “Far from it, the work pie is set to increase as more work will flow from the United States and other parts of the globe. AI still requires human oversight, and India remains the most cost-effective and efficient destination for this,” Pai said.

In a conversation with The Statesman, he said that the influx of Global Capability Centres (GCCs) into India is a strong indicator of job growth. He did admit that some 50,000 IT jobs were lost in the IT sector last year but pointed out that this accounts for just two percent of all IT jobs. “Even among those 50,000, most have already been employed elsewhere,” he added.

The AI will improve productivity by at least 25 percent, and more and more jobs will come to India, said Pai who is bullish about AI’s impact, both in the near and distant future. AI also needs a human element to make it work in the desired direction, he told The Statesman. The number of people doing the job in a place may come down by 30 to 40 percent, but most other people will be employed in other tasks or other companies, he said.

“If not anything, AI will enable humans to spend their energies on more productive aspects of the job. With AI, the grunt work will come down, and in one or two years, the total work pie will increase,” Pai said and added, “This is a transformation we must welcome and embrace.” On recent media reports about pressure on rentals or real estate going down in Bangalore on account of IT job losses, he said it was all rubbish. Rentals are declining because many are empty as still not all people have come back and are working from their homes elsewhere,” he said, adding that this led the owners to slash rents.

“There is an element of truth, about pressure on jobs, but it is not as scary as people are making it out to be. There will be an impact, but it is not as bad as they are making it out to be. The pie is going to get bigger, and more work will come from the US to India,” Pai said, betting big on GCCs that have grown very fast in the recent past.

Echoing similar sentiments on the phenomenon of GCCs as harbingers of better news for the IT, management, and other professionals, Ganapathi Ramachandran, past president of South Indian Chambers of Commerce and till recently the chairman of a leading IT firm headquartered in Chennai, told The Statesman that in this context, the GCCs are the answer. And they are growing big and fast in India, a point highlighted by Pai as well.

Ramachandran said technology is rapidly changing, putting India and the world at the cusp of a new industrial phase. “We have moved from industry 4.0 to industry 5.0 and the velocity of change this time is high and intense. The organisations have to be nimble and be ready for retraining and reselling of its executive. The third thing I see happening is that as deal sizes come down, and with increasing margin pressures, people will be compelled to move to second and third-tier cities. This will also mean for the companies to put in a concerted effort to let go of high-cost resources and instead hire low-cost resources with greater acceptance of supervision to meet the same delivery requirements,” Ramachandran said.

How it will be in the next five to ten years, as a famous saying goes, only time will tell. But suffice to say, job loss somewhere, may be created elsewhere. And in the context of Trump 2.0, India is still not a victim because they have not yet imposed any tariff on IT services.

“If that happens, it will be a day India will live to regret. If you take a peek into your crystal ball, it is fuzzy. But even then certain coding jobs will remain. Even if you are getting codes written by AI, human interface and interaction will still be needed to ensure accuracy,” Ramachandran said.

Clearly, lean and thin is going to be the mantra going forward.

But there definitely is a cause for concern, for many at the primary level of IT companies. Now, there is a movement away from outsourcing to near sourcing and this is where GCCs come in, he said.

Aditya Kamat, Co-Founder of edu-tech company HeyCoach and a relatively young IT entrepreneur, feels that in the short run, the advent of AI is for sure an exciting new prospect that can bring in more jobs, as anyone and everyone is busy adding on AI to their respective operations — the brick and mortar companies as also the digital ones. But it is the longer-run impact of AI and rapid changes in technology that foxes young entrepreneurs like Kamat to wonder if it was a good thing, after all.

In the shorter term, AI will create a lot of new jobs but eventually what will happen is that the part where today we control AI, will also be taken over by AI and this is the direction of the technology that puts in a fear element into gazing into the future, and future of technology, Kamat told The Statesman.

Now open AI is going in the direction of building robots, which means, in three or five years from now lot of jobs will be done by AI, and robotics, and humans may be involved only in managerial roles to see if the robots and machines are working well.

So, from a worker’s perspective, rapid advances in technology hide situations that may be hard to fathom but are scary enough to be worried about the future in the long run.