August 4, 2026, (Inside AI) — India’s largest IT services firm, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), added over 9,000 employees in its strongest quarterly hiring in nearly four years. The rebound comes just 12 months after the same company cut 12,000 jobs, a move widely interpreted as a verdict on artificial intelligence and employment. The swing encapsulates the chaotic debate over whether AI is destroying jobs, creating them, or merely reshuffling them.
The uncomfortable truth is that no statistical machinery exists to verify any of these claims with confidence. Until it does, the national conversation on the future of work will remain a contest of anecdotes, with every quarterly earnings release conscripted into whichever narrative needs it. The TCS layoffs were attributed by its chief executive to skill mismatches and deployment feasibility, not AI-driven productivity gains. But disentangling AI’s role from other factors is genuinely difficult, and companies have little incentive to label restructuring as AI displacement.
Research from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab found that in the United States, early-career workers in AI-exposed occupations saw a roughly 16 percent relative decline in employment while senior colleagues were untouched. The pattern is surfacing in India too. The share of employees under 30 at Infosys has fallen to its lowest level in 15 years. Entry-level tech openings in mid-2026 were down more than 40 percent from a year earlier, and fresher hiring has fallen across corporate India, with recruiters citing AI-driven redeployment as a main reason. A hiring freeze produces no pink slips, no headlines, and no data point in any Indian labour survey. The graduate who never gets an offer is invisible.
Optimists point to new streams of work. Bengaluru-based Karya pays rural workers, a majority of them women, well above prevailing wages to build voice and text datasets in Indian languages. India’s data annotation industry employs tens of thousands, and global capability centres now employ over 2 million professionals, with a majority of new roles demanding AI and data skills. But the arithmetic of “jobs lost versus jobs created” masks a stratification problem. A mid-career software engineer earning Rs 20 lakh a year and a data annotation worker earning a few thousand rupees a month both count as one job, but they are not economically equivalent. Research using vacancy data shows AI roles command a substantial wage premium but are concentrated in a narrow set of industries, cities, and large firms, and firms’ demand for AI skills actively reduces their demand for other high-skilled work.
Measurement void fuels policy guesswork
The standard policy responses—skilling missions and reassuring projections—are premature because they seek to answer a question that hasn’t been properly framed. The redesign of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) in 2025, which now produces monthly indicators, is an opportunity. But the PLFS measures whether people are working, not what is happening inside their work. It cannot detect a task being automated, a fresher intake quietly halved, or an occupation hollowing out at the entry level while holding steady at the top.
India needs occupation-level tracking of AI exposure built into its official statistics, supplemented by data the private sector already generates: job postings, hiring platforms, and industry payrolls. Every credible answer to the future of work question runs through measurement. India is preparing to spend heavily on reskilling its workforce for the AI economy. It should first invest a fraction of that in finding out what, precisely, it is reskilling them from, and what it is reskilling them for.
The writer is an Associate Fellow at Carnegie India. The entanglement of AI with broader economic shifts means the most significant displacement may not look like displacement at all. As the Stanford Digital Economy Lab notes, young workers are the canaries in the coal mine. Without better data, the debate will continue to lurch between panic and complacency.
