Given the scale of India’s workforce, any shift caused by AI — whether job losses or a slowdown in fresh hiring — tends to show up in raw numbers as larger than in other countries. Economists Sonal Varma and Si Ying Toh compiled this report based on data gathered across Asia from 2022 through August of this year. According to their findings, India saw 83,100 AI-related job additions during this period.
Only 31,921 people lost their jobs due to layoffs or other AI-linked causes, with most of these job losses attributed to companies replacing support teams with chatbots. Meanwhile, IT services graduates are receiving a large number of job offers from companies driven by rising AI-related demand. Across Asia as a whole, 1,30,758 AI-related jobs were created, with more than 90 percent of these concentrated in the technology sector. A total of 60,654 jobs were lost across the region, with 60 percent of these losses occurring in the financial services sector.
AI Brings More Benefit Than Harm
These findings disprove the widely circulated narrative that the growing use of AI technologies is leading to massive job losses. In this early phase of the AI revolution, job creation has outpaced job losses. A similar pattern is visible in other major Asian economies such as the Philippines and China, where business process outsourcing plays a significant role. While the technology is generating new jobs, it is simultaneously displacing certain older roles.
However, this shift is not benefiting everyone equally. Workers who lost jobs in routine roles such as customer care or data entry cannot simply transition into becoming “AI engineers” overnight. Nomura Holdings noted that such workers face significant challenges due to the wide gap between their existing skills and those required for these new roles. Since employment patterns vary considerably across different Asian countries, experts caution that these figures should be viewed as broad market trends rather than precise, definitive statistics.