India, the world’s back office for many global companies, is emerging as a key test case for artificial intelligence’s impact on employment, with AI-related hiring outpacing job losses so far, according to Nomura Holdings Inc.
The country’s sheer scale means it is seeing the “largest absolute impact” from AI across layoffs, hiring freezes and recruitment, making it “ground zero” for assessing the technology’s effect on jobs, Nomura economists Sonal Varma and Si Ying Toh wrote in a report analyzing 69 anecdotes across Asia, mostly from 2022 through August 2026.
India recorded 83,100 AI-related hires during the period, compared with 31,921 layoffs and attrition, according to the report released Friday. “Most firing cases are support teams replaced by chatbots, while most hiring cases are of IT-services graduates that firms explicitly credit to AI demand,” the economists said.
AI adoption is creating a two-tier labour market in countries like India and Korea, reducing demand for entry-level workers while boosting demand for more experienced employees with a deeper understanding of the business context, they added.
Across Asia, AI-related hiring totaled 130,758 jobs during the study period, with more than 90 per cent of those positions in technology. By comparison, 60,654 jobs were lost, about 60 per cent of them in financial services.
The finding “runs counter to the narrative of massive job losses due to growing AI adoption” and suggest that, at least in the early stages of the AI revolution, job creation is more than offsetting displacement, the economists said. That pattern is evident in large economies such as India and China, as well as in the Philippines, where business process outsourcing plays a central role in the labor market.
Still, the headline numbers obscure the fact that AI is creating a different set of winners and losers in the labor market. “Since displaced workers rarely transition to AI engineering roles, the aggregates do mask distributional pain,” the Nomura economists wrote.
Nomura cautioned that the findings were indicative of broader trends rather than absolute job numbers, as Asia’s labor market remains fragmented and the analysis was based on news reports.
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