The clearest picture of how artificial intelligence is reshaping work in Asia can be found in India’s vast technology industry, where hiring has slowed to its weakest pace in more than two years. According to staffing data firm Xpheno, whose figures were reported during the week of June 8, entry-level job openings across India’s IT sector have fallen 44% from a year earlier, while senior-level postings are down 67%.

The numbers from India’s biggest employers tell the same story. Tata Consultancy Services made 25,000 job offers to new graduates last month, and Infosys is expected to hire about 20,000 in the coming year. Those figures sound large, but they are well below previous levels. Tata Consultancy Services hired more than 40,000 new graduates annually during each of the previous three years. Direct campus hiring across the industry now runs roughly 30% to 35% below historical levels.

What makes this shift striking is that the companies are not shrinking. They are growing output while holding headcount flat or reducing it. Tata Consultancy Services shed a net 13,249 employees in one recent fiscal year even as revenue continued rising, while Infosys recorded the largest annual headcount decline in its history, a 5.9% decrease. Neither company attributes the trend solely to AI, but the pattern is increasingly difficult to ignore: more work, fewer people.

The stakes are enormous because of the industry’s scale. India’s technology and business-process sector generated approximately $254 billion in revenue and employed 5.4 million people, according to NASSCOM. For decades, the sector thrived by providing skilled labor to multinational corporations. Artificial intelligence is now challenging that model.

The jobs facing the greatest pressure are the very positions that launched millions of careers: entry-level coding, software testing, routine customer support, and back-office processing. These roles absorbed vast numbers of graduates each year and helped build India’s middle class. AI tools increasingly perform many of those tasks, reducing the need for large numbers of entry-level workers. Recruiters describe a growing shift toward just-in-time hiring, where employees are added only when projects require them rather than being kept on large reserve benches.

The transformation is not limited to India. Across Asia’s major financial centers, AI is moving rapidly from pilot projects to everyday operations. In Hong Kong, a 2026 KPMG employment survey found that 24% of organizations are now widely deploying AI, triple the level reported a year earlier. KPMG identified AI literacy and practical AI application as the most valuable skills employees can possess. At the same time, more employers expect to reduce headcount than increase it, reflecting one of the most cautious hiring outlooks in recent years.

For workers with the right skills, however, the technology is creating opportunities. Research published in January by UNICEF Innocenti found that AI-related job postings across South Asia continue to rise and offer salaries roughly 30% higher than comparable white-collar positions. Workers who understand how to leverage AI are seeing measurable gains in earnings and productivity. The concern is that those gains may not be shared equally.

Researchers increasingly warn of a more divided labor market, where highly skilled workers benefit from higher pay and greater demand while workers performing routine tasks face fewer opportunities. The challenge is not merely job displacement but widening inequality between those who can effectively use AI and those who cannot.

The World Bank, in its recent report on East Asia and the Pacific, offered a more optimistic long-term perspective. Historically, new technologies have expanded employment overall by increasing productivity and creating new industries. However, the benefits have tended to flow disproportionately to skilled workers, while some less-skilled workers have been pushed into more informal and less secure forms of employment.

There is also an augmentation story unfolding alongside the displacement narrative. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index, which surveyed 20,000 AI users across ten countries, found that most respondents reported higher productivity, and a majority said AI enabled them to produce work they could not have completed just a year earlier. In many cases, AI is changing how work is performed rather than simply eliminating jobs.

For businesses, the implications are substantial. Investors are increasingly distinguishing between companies that are building AI-driven products and services and those that continue to rely primarily on selling human labor. The valuation gap between those models is expected to widen.

Governments are responding as well. India’s Karnataka state, home to Bangalore, is offering incentives aimed at doubling the number of multinational global capability centers operating there to 1,000 by 2029. These centers are expected to create higher-value jobs, though they are unlikely to absorb the vast numbers of graduates that the traditional outsourcing model once employed.

The broader trend across Asia is becoming clear. Artificial intelligence is increasing productivity, boosting wages for workers who master it, and raising the skill requirements for new entrants. For a region that built much of its modern economic success on abundant, affordable, educated labor, that represents one of the most significant workplace shifts in decades.

JBizNews Desk — Asia

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