AI & jobs: Is your boss hiding something from you?

After Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT employer, announced sacking of 12,000 people or 2% of its workforce of 600,000, fear has gripped employees in the tech sector while others too are anxious. Though TCS said its layoffs are not due to artificial intelligence (AI) but "skill mismatch", concerns rise over the threat of AI to jobs across sectors. As per analysts the TCS move may be adopted by other companies that are facing similar headwinds.

India’s IT services industry body Nasscom acknowledged that the industry is at an “inflection point” and expects some workforce rationalisation in the near term. This is due to the pivot toward product-aligned delivery models and the rising demand from global clients for greater agility, speed and innovation, it said in a statement on Tuesday. Nasscom said that the technology sector is undergoing a structural transformation as AI and automation become central to business operations, with implications for both service delivery and workforce models. However, Nasscom emphasised that technology continues to be a strong growth enabler. “Every wave of disruption brings new roles, new value chains, and new opportunities,” it said, underscoring the need for continuous skilling, upskilling, and cross-skilling to build a future-ready and resilient workforce.

Yet, the threat of AI to jobs can't be overstated as is evident from rising global anxiety on this issue among employees as well as experts.


Also Read: Nasscom anticipates more layoffs across IT services industry in the near term

Is your boss hiding something from you?

Bosses in the tech sector could be downplaying the risk of AI to jobs. Geoffrey Hinton, the ex-Google employee known as the "Godfather of AI" for his work on neural networks, has been vocal about the risks of the technology. He said on a recent episode of the "One Decision" podcast that "most" people at tech companies understand the risks, but don't act on them.

"Many of the people in big companies, I think, are downplaying the risk publicly," Hinton said on the episode, which aired on July 24, as reported by Business Insider. But he mentioned one tech leader who is attuned to the potential dangers of the technology.

"Demis Hassabis, for example, really does understand the risks, and really wants to do something about it," he said.

Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind, the company's main AI lab. He co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and sold it to Google in 2014 for $650 million, under the caveat that the tech giant would create an AI ethics board. A Nobel Prize winner, Hassabis had for years hoped that academics and scientists would lead the AI scramble. Now, he's at the center of Google's push for AI dominance, and some company insiders previously told Business Insider they think he might be in the running for CEO.

In February, Hassabis said that AI poses long-term risks and warned that agentic systems could get "out of control." He has pushed for having an international governing body to regulate the technology. Late last month, protesters demonstrated outside DeepMind's London office to demand more AI transparency.

Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered a sobering reality check: AI is no longer just transforming the workplace; it’s poised to replace swathes of it. Speaking at a recent Federal Reserve conference in Washington, Altman offered an unflinching assessment of how generative AI could reshape human labor, raising both practical concerns and existential questions.

Also Read: TCS to freeze senior hiring, pause annual salary hikes

A recent study by Pew Research Centre showed that the public and experts in the US are far apart in their enthusiasm and predictions for AI. Public optimism is low regarding AI’s impact on work. While 73% of AI experts surveyed say AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on how people do their jobs over the next 20 years, that share drops to 23% among US adults, the survey showed. 64% of the US public thinks AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years while far fewer experts (39%) surveyed say the same.

AI is impacting 700 professions

Researchers at Anthropic — the AI company behind Claude, one of the most popular AI assistants — created a dataset to measure the possibilities, as per a Washington Post report. They looked into 1 million text-based conversations between users and Claude at the end of 2024 and categorized each conversation into either an augmentative or automated task. They then mapped these tasks to more than 700 distinct occupations based on work characteristics. The data show that, on average, AI (in this case, Claude) was already either automating or augmenting some 25 percent of the day-to-day tasks across all jobs by the end of 2024.

AI affects different jobs in different ways. Some, such as programmers and translators, are at a higher risk of being automated by AI. Others, such as college professors, could be augmented, the Washington Post report says. Computer- and math-related jobs get the highest automation scores — an average of 23 percent of tasks under this occupation group can be automated by AI. Meanwhile, educators and librarians get the highest augmentation scores — 40 percent of their job tasks can be augmented by AI.

However, what can assuage workers' anxieties to some extent is that AI presently does more augmentation than automation. For almost all jobs, the use of AI for augmentation — for now — remains much higher than that for automation, the Washington Post report says. This seems to indicate that AI could, at least in the short term, prove more useful than disastrous.