India, often regarded as the global back office for multinational companies, is emerging as a key testing ground for assessing how artificial intelligence is reshaping employment. AI-driven hiring has so far exceeded job losses in the country, according to Nomura Holdings Inc.
Given the size of India’s workforce and its large technology-services industry, the country is experiencing the “largest absolute impact” from AI across layoffs, hiring freezes and recruitment, making it “ground zero” for evaluating the technology’s impact on jobs, Nomura economists Sonal Varma and Si Ying Toh said in a report.
The analysis examined 69 cases across Asia, covering the period from 2022 through August 2026.
'Most firing cases are support teams replaced by chatbots'
India saw 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 stated.
AI adoption is creating a two-tier labor 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% of those positions in technology. By comparison, 60,654 jobs were lost, about 60% of them in financial services.
The findings “runs counter to the narrative of massive job losses due to growing AI adoption” and indicate that, at least in the early phase of the AI revolution, the number of new jobs created is more than making up for those displaced by the technology, the economists said. This trend is visible in major economies such as India and China, as well as the Philippines, where business process outsourcing is a major source of employment.
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.
However, Nomura warned that the findings should be viewed as an indication of broader employment trends rather than a measure of actual job numbers. The economists noted that Asia’s labour market is highly fragmented and that the analysis relied on reported news cases.
