FROM THE FRONTIER
It is pretty clear by now that developers and engineers are pretty safe, but you NEED to learn. These outsourced jobs are more process related and maintenance related.
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India’s tech giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) recently dropped the hammer with over 12,000 layoffs — the largest in the company’s history. While TCS cited “skill mismatches,” industry watchers are calling it straight: This is early evidence of AI automating jobs in the $283B outsourcing sector.
Outsourcing has always been an easy target for AI. The industry is built on carrying out repetitive, data-heavy tasks. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), industries that deal in high-quality, structured data are seeing AI adoption rates as high as 60%-70%.
It’s a rough road ahead. Experts predict 400k to 500k jobs could vanish from the sector over the next 2-3 years. “We are in the midst of a massive transition that will transform white-collar work as we know it,” warns Ray Wang from Constellation Research. The sector — which churned out millions of middle-class jobs in developing economies like India — is now watching AI automate many of its core functions.
Compare that to sectors like healthcare (where less than 10% of surgical data is publicly available) or construction (where record-keeping is “decentralized and inconsistent,” according to the U.S. Department of Education). These industries have a natural resistance to AI disruption built into their workflows.
It’s not all doom-and-gloom. The WEF predicts that though 92M jobs across industries may be on the chopping block, 170M new roles are expected to emerge. According to McKinsey, the real challenge lies in closing the gap between the jobs that vanish and the ones that pop up, and the skills workers currently have versus the ones that new roles demand.