AI creates more jobs than it cuts in India: Nomura
NEW DELHI, INDIA — Artificial intelligence (AI) has created more jobs than it has eliminated in India, with Nomura tracking 83,100 AI-linked hires against 31,921 losses for a net gain of more than 51,000 positions, challenging the prevailing narrative that automation drives net employment contraction in one of the world’s largest technology labor markets.
Nomura tracks more hires than losses in AI-driven shift
Sonal Varma and Si Ying Toh, economists at Nomura, said “most firing cases are support teams replaced by chatbots, while most hiring cases are of IT-services graduates.”
According to the Times of India, technology roles accounted for more than 90% of AI-linked hiring in Nomura’s analysis, while financial services represented roughly 60% of documented job losses.
The pattern reflects a structural recomposition: firms are eliminating volume-dependent support roles in customer service and business process outsourcing (BPO) functions while adding higher-skill technology and data positions to absorb AI infrastructure demand.
In Nomura’s sample, more than 2.6 hires occurred for every documented AI-linked job loss across 69 tracked corporate instances, a ratio that held across the broader Asia dataset of 130,758 hires against 60,654 losses.
Entry-level workers bear the heaviest AI impact
Nomura’s Sonal Varma and Si Ying Toh noted the data “reflects corporate activity direction rather than comprehensive economy-wide job counts,” a significant caveat for a sample of 69 instances tracked from 2022 to August 2026.
An Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) survey of 651 firms found that 55% reported a decline in entry-level hiring attributable to AI, against 25% at mid-level and 14% at senior level.
India’s IT sector net hiring in fiscal year 2026 reached 140,000 positions, compared with a peak of 600,000 in fiscal year 2022, indicating structural compression is occurring alongside the AI-driven gains Nomura documented.
The bifurcation of AI-driven gains in technology roles and losses in back-office support functions points to a recomposition of India’s white-collar labor market, not uniform net growth.
The divide between AI-driven hiring at the graduate IT tier and losses in support roles signals that India’s net employment gain masks a structural shift in who benefits from automation and who does not.
The offshoring model underpinning India’s technology services sector now faces the same structural pressure producing the Nomura net gains, as entry-level support roles are displaced before workers can transition to the higher-skill positions AI creates.
BPO operators serving financial services clients face the most immediate pressure, as that sector accounts for roughly 60% of documented AI-linked losses in Nomura’s sample.
Providers that can pivot toward AI-adjacent services, including model training, quality assurance, and AI-augmented customer operations, are best positioned to capture the restructuring demand the net-positive headline figure does not reveal.
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Disclosure: Outsource Accelerator uses AI tools in the backend of its editorial workflow. Every article is reviewed and verified by a human editor before publication.
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