AI quietly taking away low-value jobs: Are you at risk?

India Today

25-06-2025

As more and more companies implement artificial intelligence (AI) at the enterprise level, it is changing how they approach hiring of talent. 'India is a growing economy, so new jobs are being created. However, the number of jobs being lost due to AI is much higher than the ones created,' says Aditya Narayan Mishra, MD and CEO of HR services firm CIEL HR.Another transition underway is that most of the new jobs being created are highly skilled, such as of data scientists, cloud engineers and full-stack developers, because AI models are increasingly replacing low-value, repetitive roles that don't require cognitive skills.advertisementPranay Kale, chief revenue and growth officer at jobs platform Foundit, shares, 'In 2022, less than 10 per cent of software engineering roles required knowledge of AI or machine learning (ML). Fast forward to 2025 and that number has more than doubled to 23 per cent, with AI/ML expectations becoming a part of mainstream development.'As a result, says Kale, the job market is becoming polarised—between those who work with AI and those whose roles can be replaced by it. Job-seekers will now have to become AI-literate—whether they're in design, analysis, marketing or operations. 'Businesses will not hire in volume, will instead hire for skills, with a clear bias toward tech-integrated, future-proof capabilities,' he adds.
Kamal Karanth, co-founder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing firm, puts this into perspective. He says that since Robotic Process Automation (RPA) became mainstream a decade ago, lower-spectrum roles—those that are rule-based, objective, repeatable and transferable—have been increasingly impacted.advertisement'The threat of AI replacing human role-holders is high and imminent in these lower-spectrum functions. The demand for entry-level talent in such low-complexity roles will gradually decline as Agentic AI tools and processes (AI systems capable of autonomous action with minimal human intervention) mature,' he says.For instance, roles such as of test engineers, application testers, QA testers, software test engineers, and QA engineers—who account for more than a third (36 per cent-40 per cent) of the total talent pool in the IT sector's testing and QA/QC functions—fall into this category. These are likely to become highly replaceable roles as AI matures in the near term.In contrast, middle-spectrum roles that require a mix of rule-based actions and intuitive, mid-level cognitive processing face a longer-term threat of full automation. AI's current maturity curve in terms of precision and consistency is still developing. However, talent in this layer can benefit from AI by using it to enhance speed and scale.At the higher end of the spectrum, roles that demand advanced cognitive skills have a long way to go before they can challenge or disrupt this talent tier. Here, AI will serve more as an assistant than a replacement, helping workers operate more efficiently, but posing little threat of displacing them.advertisement'The next 10 years in the world of work will be a time of massive transition, much like during the Industrial Revolution when the onset of automation led to widespread unemployment,' predicts Mishra. 'With AI, many lower-level jobs are already disappearing, and this impact is only going to grow with time.'Subscribe to India Today Magazine- Ends