Artificial intelligence may not eliminate entire professions, but it could change how young Indians enter the workforce and build their careers. A new white paper from IIT Madras’s Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI), released in October 2026, examines how AI is altering work across industries, from software engineering and customer service to manufacturing and financial services. It warns that automating routine tasks traditionally assigned to junior employees could weaken the pathways through which workers gain experience and progress into senior roles. For India, this raises questions about graduate employment, workforce training and the future structure of jobs.
How AI Is Changing Jobs
In India’s BPO industry, AI voice agents can handle password resets, order-status enquiries and payment reminders. In accounting, specialised tools can process invoices, reconcile bank statements and prepare parts of GST returns. Software developers increasingly use AI to generate routine code. These activities have something in common: they represent individual tasks within larger jobs. Automating them does not necessarily eliminate the jobs or professions involved.
The IIT Madras researchers distinguish between automating a task, changing an employee’s job, restructuring an occupation and producing wider employment outcomes such as changes in recruitment, wages or working conditions. Whether automating these tasks leads to job losses or changes in employees’ responsibilities depends on how employers reorganise work around AI. Customer-service employees may increasingly handle complex complaints, accountants may focus on verification and professional accountability, and software engineers may concentrate on system design and difficult technical problems. If AI takes over enough recurring tasks, employers may also combine responsibilities or reduce the number of employees required.
The paper cautions that technological capability alone does not determine these outcomes. Cost, reliability, regulation and the value of human judgement also matter. It cites Swedish fintech Klarna’s decision to restore human involvement in customer service after quality problems with aggressive automation as an example of these limits.
The Challenge Entry-Level Workers Face
While experienced employees may use AI to become more productive, the paper identifies a particular problem for workers entering a profession. Junior positions have traditionally offered a way to develop expertise through relatively straightforward assignments. New programmers learn by writing basic code, junior lawyers by reviewing documents, and customer-service agents by handling routine calls. These tasks may be repetitive, but they help employees acquire the practical knowledge and judgement required for more demanding responsibilities.
As AI takes over these tasks, companies may continue to need experienced professionals while offering fewer opportunities for junior employees to develop the expertise required for senior roles. The researchers warn of a possible ‘missing middle’: a workforce in which junior roles contract while demand for senior expertise remains.
This is particularly relevant to India’s IT, BPO, finance and professional-services industries, which have historically recruited large numbers of graduates.
The paper cites a June 2026 Cognizant–Pearson survey of 750 senior HR professionals across India, the US and the UK, which reported that AI was already performing 37% of entry-level tasks in India, compared with an average of 33% across the three countries.
The survey also found that 96% of HR leaders expected entry-level roles to shift towards supervising or managing AI systems over the next five years. This suggests that junior work may be redesigned rather than simply eliminated, although it does not establish whether these new responsibilities will provide adequate opportunities for employees to develop professional expertise.
One possible redesigned career pathway could see a customer-service employee begin by supervising AI-generated responses, progress to handling difficult cases and eventually take responsibility for quality evaluation, AI conversation design or operations management.
Why AI’s Impact Will Vary Across India’s Workforce
In India, the cost of AI could determine which jobs are automated first and which businesses can afford to adopt the technology. The IIT Madras white paper describes this as “AI-cost geography”. It notes that relatively inexpensive, specialised AI can already handle routine customer-service calls, bookkeeping and factory quality checks. However, more advanced applications, including complex legal research and diagnostic imaging, may remain too costly or difficult to deploy reliably across smaller organisations.
These differences could influence not only the pace of automation but also who benefits from it. Larger, better-resourced firms may adopt advanced AI sooner, while smaller businesses could be limited to cheaper, task-specific tools, creating different demands for workers’ skills and responsibilities.
The impact could extend to India’s informal workforce, even where AI does not directly replace workers. For instance, AI-based lending systems could change which small businesses qualify for credit, while platform algorithms could influence the availability of work and earnings for gig workers.
Beyond Job Creation: Preparing Workers For New Roles
AI may create new opportunities even as existing roles contract, but workers affected by automation will not necessarily have the skills or resources to move into them. The IIT Madras paper identifies emerging roles in AI training, quality evaluation, system integration and infrastructure management. It also cites NITI Aayog’s October 2025 roadmap, developed with NASSCOM and BCG, which projects the potential for up to four million AI-related jobs over five years, provided there is coordinated investment in skills and workforce development.
The researchers recommend training linked to realistic alternative roles, with clarity on the skills required, who pays for reskilling and how workers are supported during the transition. Industries dependent on graduate recruitment will also need to rethink how junior employees gain practical experience as AI takes over routine assignments.
The training gap is already evident among large employers. In the Cognizant–Pearson survey, 63% of Indian organisations reported that their learning and development programmes were struggling to keep pace with AI-driven changes in jobs.
New roles are not the only consideration. The researchers also warn that workers who remain employed may face more demanding tasks, closer monitoring and greater responsibility for correcting AI errors, without corresponding improvements in wages.
The white paper draws on existing studies and illustrative industry cases rather than a representative employment survey. The researchers therefore call for more India-specific evidence on how AI is changing recruitment, wages, working conditions and career progression.
The larger challenge for India is to ensure that AI-driven productivity gains do not come at the cost of the training and career progression needed to develop its future workforce.