Summary of this article
· Job displacement in tech sector could reach 1.5 million if no action is taken
· NITI Aayog's report suggests an urgent action plan to unify AI efforts across ministries
· It expects to create around 4 million jobs in AI by 2031 by taking a timely action
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the landscape of job opportunities in India and globally. According to a Niti Aayog report titled ‘Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy’, the rapid development in AI can take away millions of jobs, but can also create new jobs.
As India stands at the crossroads, a timely action could generate up to 4 million jobs or lead to a loss of over 1.50 million jobs in the technology sector by 2031, the report, prepared in collaboration with the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which was released on October 10, 2025 says. It highlights how the technology service sector could be impacted in the coming 5-6 years due to AI.
According to the report, the IT services and the customer experience services are at the frontline of the AI-led disruption. Therefore, a business-as-usual approach could be detrimental and lead to a downside, shrinking the headline in the technology service sector from 7.50-8 million in 2023 to 6 million by 2031. Similarly, the customer service sector headcount could also reduce from 2-2.50 million in 2023 to 1.80 million in the next six years.
Three Challenges
The report also highlights three challenges:
The sheer scale of the job displacement risk
Fundamental shortcomings in education and skills development
Widening gap between supply and demand for AI talent
The jobs that are of repetitive nature, such as manual tester, data entry analyst, and the like, are highly exposed to automation.
However, the report stresses that India is not completely at the losing end, and it can capture the upside with strategic planning and action.
It notes that AI is also unlocking new job roles that didn’t exist earlier, such as AI prompt engineers, AI architect, AI ops engineer, ethical AI specialist, quantum ML engineer, among others.
Further, AI technologies have also made accent neutralisation and real-time language translation possible, which is reducing the traditional barriers, and could shift onshore customer service jobs to India.
So, to utilise the developing job opportunities, the report recommends the immediate establishment of a unified action plan, ‘India AI Talent Mission’, to unify the fragmented efforts of various ministries and agencies.
Three Recommendations
It offers three recommendations for the initiative:
Embedding AI fluency – Introduce AI across all educational levels, from schools to universities.
Building a globally attractive AI talent magnet – Taking measures like offering compute grid access for returnees and introducing an AI Talent Visa to attract global AI talent, and positioning India as a premier destination.
Launching a massive AI skilling engine – For reskilling and upskilling the current workforce.
It suggests coordination with the existing India AI Mission and establishing an India Open-Source AI Commons to provide open data and models to all to democratise innovation. Besides, it also suggests operationalising a federated national compute and innovation grid to ensure access to the AI infrastructure.
The purpose is to make India ready not to withstand the disruption, but to create sustainable and inclusive opportunities in the AI economy in a mission mode to secure long-term competitiveness in the global AI economy.
