In Gurugram, the sprawling tech suburb outside New Delhi, Krishna Khandelwal is using artificial intelligence to build an army of chatbots designed to eliminate the kind of jobs that once lifted India into the ranks of the world\u2019s fastest-growing economies.<\/p>\n
Since last summer, his start-up, Hunar.AI, has offered companies bespoke A.I. voice agents that steer job applicants through virtually every step of the hiring process, from r\u00e9sum\u00e9 screening to orientation.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor onboarding,\u201d he said in an interview in the company\u2019s headquarters in a shared work space, \u201cyou don\u2019t need humans at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a quarter century, India has made itself the world\u2019s back office, providing an educated, English-speaking work force to do tasks more cheaply than in the United States or Europe. The industry today employs more than six million people and is worth nearly $300 billion, more than 7 percent of the country\u2019s gross domestic product.<\/p>\n
Now, A.I. threatens to do to India what its outsourcing model did to the rest of the world: replace hundreds of thousands of office workers.<\/p>\n
Economies everywhere are bracing for an era in which A.I. tools automate entire categories of white-collar work, but the brunt could fall hardest on India, undermining two decades of effort to climb the value chain and establish a place in the global tech world.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a matter of time,\u201d said Deedy Das, a partner at Menlo Ventures, an investment firm that closely tracks A.I. \u201cMarkets are pretty efficient. If a tool exists that does a job cheaper, it will be adopted,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m surprised it hasn\u2019t happened at a faster clip, but it will.\u201d<\/p>\n
The tremors are already being felt. Tata Consultancy Services, one of India\u2019s largest employers, has shrunk its work force to 580,000, a decline of more than 20,000 from a peak in 2022, when it hired 100,000 new workers in one year alone.<\/p>\n
Its main rival, Infosys, has also slowed hiring, while dozens of smaller start-ups laid off workers across the country in 2025, according to Inc42, a digital economy news outlet in India.<\/p>\n
Graduates of the country\u2019s universities and technical colleges are finding fewer openings, forcing them to scramble to \u201cupskill,\u201d an increasingly popular term in the context of learning the A.I. technology that is reshaping the industry.<\/p>\n
Tech stocks in India were already slumping this year, but a speculative report on Feb. 22 by Citrini Research, an analytics company based in the United States, sent them spiraling, by painting a doomsday scenario about A.I.\u2019s impact on India in particular.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe entire model was built on one value proposition: Indian developers cost a fraction of their American counterparts,\u201d the report<\/a> said, imagining the world in the not-so-distant future of 2028. \u201cBut the marginal cost of an A.I. coding agent had collapsed to, essentially, the cost of electricity.\u201d<\/p>\n Narendra Modi, India\u2019s prime minister since 2014, has recognized the challenge. Like many leaders, he has pledged to make the country an A.I. power, including by overseeing international deals and urging the country\u2019s own software engineers to develop new technologies and export them to the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThere have been certain turning points that have shaped entire countries,\u201d Mr. Modi said during an international conference on A.I. in New Delhi last month, according to a translation of his remarks. \u201cThese turning points set the direction of civilization and transform the pace of development. Artificial intelligence is one such transformation in history.\u201d<\/p>\n It is far from clear, however, whether India is positioned to make that transformation. While it has a highly educated work force, it lacks the infrastructure and natural resources needed to power A.I. products.<\/p>\n At the A.I. conference in New Delhi, India\u2019s largest outsourcing firms announced deals<\/a> with American companies including Anthropic and OpenAI to expand use of their products and to develop data center capacity to power them. The announcements, while welcomed as foreign investment in the economy, underscored how reliant the country remains on the United States for everything from the microchips to the foundational models that are driving the A.I. boom.<\/p>\n