Veteran investor and market expert Ramesh Damani has warned that the rapid pivot towards artificial intelligence in the global technology ecosystem could hurt students and lead to the death of entry-level placements from IITs and other tech institutes.
In a conversation with NDTV Profit, Damani had already raised alarm bells for Indian IT companies, suggesting that the AI boom is pretty much real and here to stay. Keeping that in mind, he believes the shift towards agentic AI may have serious ramifications for the job market.
“The easy entry-level software jobs that people got graduating from IIT or technical institutes will probably be gone,” Damani told NDTV Profit.
The veteran investor, who is also a member of the BSE, added that the softening of jobs in this segment will be offset by job creation on the Global Capability Centre (GCC) front.
“There's a lot of movement in Global Capability Centres in India, which will take the role of software, so there will be employment there,” he said.
Damani further stated that AI will create new job variants, and although there is some uncertainty over the future of certain IT jobs, the overall sector will do just fine.
“For example, if you were in the 80s, you never heard of someone—you were a bank teller, you never heard of an ATM expert or a YouTube influencer. All these new jobs keep getting created. So while there is some pessimism regarding the software jobs in India, I think overall the employment will continue to do fine. I would not be too worried about that at this point,” he added.
When asked about the pivot to AI, Damani pointed out a key piece of data that highlighted how modern-day AI firms, such as Anthropic, can execute tasks through AI using a fraction of the workforce compared to the Indian IT firms.
“Someone sent me a tweet yesterday, which I'll share with you. They said the top Indian seven Indian software companies are worth about $350 billion. Anthropic is worth $350 billion in itself. Anthropic has 2,000 employees; we have 16 lakh employees. That is a scale of productivity change that is happening in this business,” he said.
Damani's view on the job market in the wake of AI comes on the back of a turbulent 2025 that saw even the biggest firms in the world cut expenses by laying off workers and automating tasks.
Artificial intelligence was responsible for almost 55,000 layoffs in the US in 2025, as per consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
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