India Added 2.6 AI-Related Jobs for Every One Lost, Nomura Data Shows, But the Winners and Losers Aren't the Same People

India's AI jobs story is not the mass-unemployment narrative many predicted. It's also not a clean win.

According to a Nomura report first accessed by Bloomberg News, India recorded 83,100 AI-related hires against 31,921 layoffs and attrition tied to the technology between 2022 and August 2026. That works out to roughly 2.6 AI-related hires for every job lost or affected, the largest net gain of any market Nomura examined.

Nomura economists Sonal Varma and Si Ying Toh built the numbers from 69 employment cases across Asia. India showed up as the single biggest contributor to both hiring and job losses in the region, which is why the economists call it "ground zero" for measuring what AI actually does to a labor market, according to Bloomberg's reporting as relayed by India Today and Business Today.

Zoom out to the whole region and the pattern holds. Nomura counted 130,758 AI-related jobs added across Asia, over 90% of them in tech, against 60,654 lost, with about 60% of those losses concentrated in financial services, according to Business Today's account of the report. "This runs counter to the narrative of massive job losses due to growing AI adoption," the economists wrote, per reporting cited by The Next Web.

The catch nobody should skip past

The jobs disappearing and the jobs appearing are not interchangeable.

Nomura found that most of the layoff cases in India involved support teams getting replaced by chatbots, handling customer service, routine testing, and data processing. Most of the hiring cases involved IT-services graduates recruited specifically because of AI-related demand, roles that need specialized technical training, according to the report as described by India Today.

A laid-off customer-support rep does not walk into an AI engineering job. Business Today's coverage put it plainly: the report highlights "a critical disconnect," since new AI positions demand specialized degrees, advanced technical skills, and years of experience that displaced workers typically don't have.

The Next Web's writeup framed the consequence directly: "Since displaced workers rarely transition to AI engineering roles, the aggregates do mask distributional pain." India and South Korea are both developing a two-tier labor market, thinning out demand for entry-level hires while rewarding experienced staff who already understand the business.

For a country whose IT industry has long used entry-level jobs as the on-ramp for millions of young graduates, this poses a real problem. If that rung disappears, the traditional path from college into a stable tech career gets harder to climb, regardless of how many net jobs the aggregate numbers show.

The scale of what's being disrupted

India's IT outsourcing sector isn't a side business. It's worth roughly $280 billion, accounts for about 7% of India's GDP, and drives close to a quarter of the country's export earnings, according to NASSCOM's 2025 report cited in industry coverage. The sector directly employs 5.67 million IT engineers.

The business model has always been about wage arbitrage: an American programmer costs roughly $150,000 a year, while an Indian engineer costs $15,000 to $20,000. AI tools that can do bug-fixing and testing work in minutes instead of requiring dozens of junior staff for weeks are cutting directly into that arbitrage, since the marginal cost of running an AI subscription is a fraction of even the cheapest human labor cost.

This isn't hypothetical for individual workers. Separate reporting has documented cases of experienced professionals, not just junior coders, losing stable, high-paying positions and struggling for a year or more to find comparable work after AI-driven job cuts hit their roles.

The Week's reporting on India's broader Gen Z job market adds useful context and a real caveat: youth unemployment estimates run as high as 40% by some measures, and Professor Chandrasekhar Sripada of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad attributes the slowdown to multiple overlapping causes, not AI alone, including slow manufacturing investment, reduced reliance on migrant labor, and a weak supply of job-ready talent for sectors like semiconductors. Pinning India's youth jobs crunch entirely on AI oversimplifies a mess that includes tariffs, a post-COVID hiring boom ending, and structural skills gaps that predate the AI wave.

What the data can and can't tell you

Nomura's own economists flagged the limits of their study. It's built from 69 news-reported cases, not payroll or government employment records, in a labor market they themselves call fragmented. It's a snapshot of an early, fast-moving phase, not a verdict on where this settles.

McKinsey has estimated that by 2030, roughly 30% of work hours in India could be automated. Whether the hiring numbers keep outpacing the layoffs as that automation deepens, or whether the entry-level rung keeps eroding faster than new AI-skilled roles can absorb displaced graduates, is the open question India's labor market hasn't answered yet.