Amazon lays off 14,000 employees, with more layoffs expected in the future.
Intel has cut over 24,000 jobs in the past few months.
UPS says goodbye to 48,000 employees as they stare at their most formidable figure bound to replace them: AI (or more technically, artificial intelligence).
The daunting question: What happens to the millions of young Indians about to graduate into a job market that is actively replacing people with hallucinating, water-guzzling LLMs who can beat them in seconds in what they for minutes or even hours?
For decades, we believed that degrees, discipline, and hard work created stability. Indian parents encouraged engineering and medicine because they represented secure, respected careers for their children. But today, even the most stable jobs: software engineering, customer service, support operations, and retail management are experiencing disruption from AI.
AI has grown smarter and, most importantly, faster and more efficient than ever. The work that used to require hundreds of people now requires one human and one machine, and eventually, may require no human beings at all. The rules of the game have changed, and the Indian workplace must adapt to that change.
Listening to Raj Shamani’s conversation with Vaibhav Sisinty at the gym, I gathered insights from this anxiety-filled situation. Sisinty, a growth consultant who has helped brands scale using Internet and AI strategies, states that AI is here to stay and outlines what steps need to be taken for companies to leverage this powerful phenomenon.
Microsoft CoPilot Research and What The Results Show
Microsoft released a report of CoPilot’s data between it and people on the future of the workplace. It listed 40 jobs that will be disrupted by AI and 40 that will not be disrupted by AI. The jobs that will be disrupted required the Internet, the computer, or chores: software engineering, graphic designing, mathematician, historian, cab drivers, and waiters.
These professions follow playbooks which contained structured steps and set templates. However, with the ever-changing world of the information technology era, templates change rapidly and keeping up with that pace is difficult for the Indian workplace. Sisinty estimates 80% of jobs in India are built on such workflows. The moment work becomes predictable, AI learns it, performs it, and replaces the individuals itself.
The good news is that not every job will be disrupted by AI.
The bad news is that these jobs include physical work, such as nursing, plumbing, and carpentry, which remain safe because AI cannot replicate human craftsmanship and intelligence.
So must we become plumbers and nurses in the age of AI? Of course not.
Sisinty suggests the Indian workplace should follow directional thinking: understanding where the world is heading over the next years and adapting to new methods of working. The workers who think ahead, instead of following outdated templates, will define the future of India.
There’s one problem, though. Governments around the world are painfully slow at taking action to protect the workforce. Policy moves slowly, but technology rapidly changes in a matter of seconds. By the time governments draft regulations, entire industries have already shifted, and the unemployment rate climbs. This will be the death of entry-level jobs.
So what can students fresh out of college possibly do?
According to Sisinty, the answer is surprisingly optimistic. The youth of our country are grateful to live in the Internet generation, where access to knowledge, information, and, of course, LLMs, can open new opportunities, and in fact, create new jobs and roles for the emerging workplace.
Calling them “pockets of opportunity”, he provides the example of SMEs across India. SMEs need growth, automation, and lead generation, which AI is proficient at, but areas where SMEs lack the expertise to implement solutions. This creates a huge room for the youth to step in.
During and after graduation, students should build at least one or two years of practical AI experience. They must learn to:
- deploy voice agents so perfect they sound human
- prompt engineering at a professional level
- learn to optimize ads through AI
- Automate procurement workflows
- Integrate AI with sales and customer success.
After solving a problem with the SMEs, the next step is to create a product for the solution. This service becomes a solution that becomes a business. This is possible only when they understand AI better than anyone else.
Reliance Partners with Google: A Gemini Blueprint Case Study
Reliance teams up with Google to provide eighteen months of Gemini Pro access to millions of Jio users at no cost. For the first time, young Indians aged 18-25 will have access to Google’s most powerful models from Gemini 2.5 Pro to Notebook LM (a user-friendly research tool) and Nano Banana (an image generator), cloud storage, and much more.
For the Indian workplace, Reliance is partnering with Google Cloud to bring advanced AI accelerators and TPUs to India, giving Indian businesses access to the same power used by the world’s biggest tech companies. The employees will learn how to train and deploy AI models. Reliance adopts Gemini Enterprise, a platform that allows every employee to create, train, deploy, and run AI agents easily and safely.
Reliance will create what Ambani calls an “AI-empowered India,” where Indian companies will incorporate AI models to further enhance and expedite menial. Investing in this opportunity, both corporations and workers will benefit. AI literacy for the people and AI capability for the companies. This nation will get an AI foundation that accelerates the growth of jobs instead of cutting them.
The youth of India, please stand up.
The future of your life is not at stake. It requires adaptability and understanding of AI. The opportunities are real, but they belong to the workers who solve problems rather than follow tasks. AI will not replace humans, but those who embrace AI, build directional thinking, and solve real problems will shape India’s growth.
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