Daybreak - The more AI can do your job, the safer it may be

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

India built its IT industry on millions of coders doing exactly the work generative AI now does in seconds. So everyone knew who would feel the pressure first. The data refuses to cooperate. A survey of 1,552 tech professionals by the app Blind last week found the engineers, the ones everyone expects AI to replace, are the least worried of anyone surveyed. And an ICRIER study of 651 firms found the roles most exposed to AI, developers and analysts, are the ones firms want most. Why does demand for technical workers persist as AI takes on more of their work?

For the past two years, one of the biggest fears around AI and work has been that the jobs most exposed to the technology would face the greatest pressure. India seemed particularly vulnerable. Its technology industry, one of the country's biggest export businesses and its workforce have been built around software development, engineering and other forms of knowledge work. NASCOM had estimated that India's tech sector would reach about $315 billion in revenue. in the financial year ending in March 26, with employment coming close to 6 million people. But warnings from the AI industry itself have been stock. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had warned that AI would eventually eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs. Goldman Sachs had estimated that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs globally to automation.

For India, this raises an obvious concern. Software developers and other technical workers spend their days doing work that generative AI is increasingly capable of helping with. So you might expect these workers to be among the first to feel the pressure. But a survey of more than 1,500 India-based professionals conducted by the workplace platform called Blind in July, the results of which came out last week, offers a different picture of where this anxiety is concentrated. It found that 66% of people in AI and machine learning expected layoffs or significant headcount cuts in their teams within three to six months. Among engineers, 24% said that such cuts were likely the lowest share for that measure among the functions surveyed. Now, these are just expectations of people, not actual layoffs.

But they tell us something about where workers themselves see the risk. And then there is another piece of evidence that's quite interesting. You see, in February, ICR-I-E-R, which is a think tank based in India, published a study based on a survey of 651 IT forms across 10 Indian cities conducted between November 2025 and January 26. But before we get any further into the study, I have an important disclosure. The study was supported by Open AI, which is a company with an obvious interest in how the employment effects of AI are understood.

However, the study is worth reading carefully rather than just dismissing it or accepting it at face value because its findings are quite striking. It found that the occupations with the highest exposure to generative AI, which is software developers, app developers, database designers, and statisticians were also the occupations where companies reported the strongest growth in demand. Basically, software-related divisions saw the least moderation in employment.

And the biggest hiring pressure was actually at the entry level. So, the labour market in India is sending out some contradictory signals. Technical workers are becoming more exposed to AI, but companies continue to want their skills. And hiring is slowing down across the sector, but AI-related hiring is growing. And the pressure is particularly visible among people trying to get their first job. So why does the demand for technical workers still persist even though AI is taking on more and more of their work? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nikda Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle.

Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargis and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 18th of August. Let's start with the fear itself. The ICRIER study gives some numbers to it. Statisticians and mathematicians had an average AI exposure score of 3.86 on a 5-point scale. App developers scored 3.39. Database designers scored 3.32. And software developers and analysts scored 3.18.

Now, these are among the occupations where generative AI has made some of its fastest progress. Coding is the office example. AI tools can generate code, explain it, identify errors and handle parts of the software development process itself. That changes the economics of work. Companies are responding by hiring for some of the skills needed to use that technology. Noccary data, which was reported by Reuters, showed AI hiring in India's IT sector rose 16% year-on-year in June, even as overall IT recruitment fell by 3%. Across 14 sectors, AI and machine learning jobs rose 25%. Noccurie's parent company, InfoEG,

said that demand was increasingly focused on specialized and senior talent. This shift has been building for a while. Between January 2023 and March 2025, AI-related job postings more than doubled as a share of all listings from 2.9% to 6.5% and demand for AI skills grew 75% faster than for other roles. Now, all of this is happening against a broader slowdown. TCS chairman N. Chandershakeren, who recently stepped down, said in June that the company was moving towards having an equal number of AI agents and human employees and expected AI to reduce

the pace of hiring even as the company continued to employ people. TCS's workforce had fallen by more than 23,000 in the financial year that ended in March 26. Now, the money behind this shift is real. TCS reported annualized AI revenue of about $2.4 billion in the quarter that ended in March, growing at more than 22% a quarter. So, companies are simultaneously looking for AI capabilities and also becoming more cautious about overall headcount. The ICRIER survey explains how both of these things can happen. Across the business functions of companies identified as most affected by AI,

38% reported a combination of smaller teams and higher output. The researchers classified this as a significant productivity gain. They found productivity gains outnumbered productivity declines by 3.5 to 1. In software development and engineering, the ratio was 3.7 to 1. Now, think about what this does to a software team. An engineer using AI tools can get through some tasks faster. the company can use that extra capacity in several ways. It can reduce the team, it can ask the existing team to take on more work,

it can launch more products, it can pursue projects that were previously too expensive, the employment outcome depends on which of those choices that the company makes. And that is one reason a job can become highly exposed to AI while the demand for people doing that job remains strong. But there is a caveat here that matters. The study finds a relationship between AI exposure and reported occupational demand. But it does not establish that AI caused demand for those occupations to rise. The researchers themselves acknowledge a possible reverse relationship,

that companies may be adopting AI in areas where the demand was already growing. So the data gives us an association, not really a causal verdict. Still, the combination of the survey and the noughts, data points to a labor market that is becoming more selective. Companies are spending on AI capabilities and they are looking for specialized technical talents and they are also at the same time slowing hiring elsewhere. So the next question is where is that pressure really landing? More on that in the next segment.

But before that, we have something to tell you. Hello everyone. I am Snigda and I am the co-host and producer of Daybreak, which is the Ken's Daily News podcast. And I am Praveen. I am the host and producer of 2x2, the Ken's Business Strategy podcast. And Praveen is working on something super exciting

and he's here to tell us all about it. Yes, it is actually a project that we are calling the Great ReWiring, which is the third edition of the Ken's case competitions. Snigda, you remember the first two case competitions. Yes. Of course I do. And every year you're getting bigger and better and more popular, Well, I certainly hope so. This year, we are actually doing this thing where we are asking students all over India to tell us what happens when agents take over India and how they're going to rewire the lives of Indians all over.

Give me an example. Oh, let me tell you this thing. We are actually finding out examples by asking subscribers like you. What are the strange, annoying and weird things that you do that frustrates you? Maybe things that you procrastinate, maybe things that you don't do, maybe things that you do, but they're very repetitive and very manual. What are the things that you wish you had a digital assistant who could just take over from you? Tell me an example of... Oh my God.

I have a big example that everybody can relate to it is paying bills. Interesting. Go on. It is so annoying, especially the subscriptions and your phone bill because I don't like the idea of auto pay because I want to have some sense of control over my money and also getting out of phone. auto pay is a hassle. So every month end or beginning, I'm always procrastinating and then I'm getting 10 reminders from Vodafone and like 20 reminders from Spotify and it's just really annoying. Yeah. Wouldn't it be cool, Snikda, if you had an agent that basically looked through all the places that you were spending money on subscriptions and all of these other places and would come and tell you maybe every few weeks, a very friendly agent would come and say, Snikda, I think you should

stop doing this. I don't think you're using this anymore. Oh, you should probably stop doing this other thing or you should replace it. There's a cheaper plan that I think you would like. Wouldn't that be really cool and very helpful? This would be mind-blowing amazing and also so helpful. Yeah, but I think there are going to be other weird things. In fact, subscribers have written to us and told us about things like how they struggle to manage their parents' health or how they're essentially using WhatsApp as a way to store all their documents. So there are all these weird workarounds that people do and you're nodding so I'm guessing you're one of them. And order to find out, we are running a survey right now.

And it's a survey called the Great Re wiring survey. The link of it is in the show notes. And we're going to ask you if you're listening to this. Take the survey. It's a fun survey. It's just going to take you five minutes. And we are even going to tell you what are the weird things that other people confessed. And if you take this survey, you will find out what are the weird things that you're doing.

And we're going to ask thousands and thousands of student teams all over. India over the next two to three months to build solutions that solve these problems. And how long do we have to wait to hear these weird problems? Maybe just a couple of weeks. We'll be done. All right. Looking forward to it. Yeah. The survey is here. I would recommend you take it. Yes, please do. Link is in the show notes. And please do share it with your friends and family. Yeah, it's very easy to share.

And tag us on social media if you're sharing it on social media. Let us look at the occupations with lower exposure to AI in the ICR IER study. Human Resources or HR had an average exposure score of 2.34. Legal professionals scored 2.35 and finance was about 2.75. Now these are among the least AI exposed occupations in the study. And yet HR and legal were also the only occupations in the study where reported demand had declined. And when researchers asked respondents which rules and skills were being phased out or reduced because of AI, data entry, clerical and back office processing was the largest category, cited in 32% of the responses.

Manual software testing and quality assurance came next at 15%. And entry level programming was at 13%. Now, these responses came from an open-ended question, so they should be read as a picture of what respondents are seeing and expecting rather than account of jobs actually eliminated across the industry. But they do point towards something important about how companies are making decisions. The researchers divide business functions into profit centers and cost centers. Software development and engineering sit among the profit center functions in their classification.

They found that these teams experienced little to no decline in size despite being among the functions most affected by AI. On the other hand, some cost-center functions saw large contractions, and that included technical teams such as R&D and quality assurance. The logic is pretty straightforward. An IT company earns money from the products and services its technical teams deliver. HR, finance, legal, and other support functions help those teams operate. So, when technology raises productivity, management has decisions to make about where to put the savings, which basically means more money can go into the part of the organization that is generating new businesses,

and some of the savings can reduce operating costs. Now, all of this information makes the blind survey even more interesting. Sales and marketing workers had the highest expectation of layoffs or significant headcount reductions at 68%. And AI and machine learning workers were at 66%. And among engineers, it was 24% who said, that such cuts were very likely. The survey does not tell us whether those expectations will become actual layoffs, but the pattern is pretty consistent with the broader story that I'm trying to tell you,

which is coming from the ICRIER data. The pressure from AI can show up in a company's hiring decisions and allocation of resources long before a machine is capable of doing an entire job. That is all for today. If you have any thoughts or feedback for this episode, please do write to me and snigda at the ken.com. It is the-h-k-en-com. Thank you for tuning in and we will catch you tomorrow.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button. on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleagues Niktha Sharma and edited by Radif CN.