India's tech services sector can create up to 4 million jobs in 5 years: NITI Aayog

New Delhi, Oct 10 (IANS) While India’s tech services sector faces the threat of significant job displacements by 2031, it also has the opportunity to create up to 4 million new jobs in the next five years, NITI Aayog said on Friday.

To turn disruption into opportunity, NITI Aayog has recommended the launch of a National AI Talent Mission, a bold, nationally coordinated effort to transform India into the AI workforce capital of the world.

NITI Aayog released a ‘Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy’ by B.V.R. Subrahmanyam, CEO, NITI Aayog, in the presence of Sanjay Kumar, Secretary, Department of School Education and Literacy; Vineet Joshi, Secretary, Department of Higher Education; Debjani Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow, NITI Aayog and other distinguished guests and dignitaries.

The roadmap examines how Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the tech services industry through the lens of work, worker, and workforce.

The report highlights that AI disruption is already reshaping jobs in India’s $245 billion technology and customer experience (CX) sectors.

Without swift action, routine roles such as QA engineers and L1 support agents risk rapid redundancy. But with the right skilling, reskilling, and innovation pathways, India could emerge as a global hub for AI-first roles — from Ethical AI Specialists and AI Trainers to Sentiment Analysts and AI DevOps Engineers.

“India’s strength lies in its people. With over 9 million technology and customer experience professionals, and the world’s largest pool of young digital talent, we have both the scale and ambition. What we need now is urgency, vision, and coordination,” said Subrahmanyam.

“The difference between job loss and job creation depends squarely on the choices we make today. This roadmap provides a clear, actionable path to ensure India becomes the global epicentre of AI talent by 2035,” added Ghosh.

It also advocates close collaboration between the proposed India AI Talent Mission and the ongoing India AI Mission, along with partnerships between academia, government and industry to create an enabling ecosystem of compute infrastructure and data availability to forge the trained talent into innovators and researchers of tomorrow.

India’s future in the AI economy hinges on decisive action. With coordinated leadership across government, industry, and academia, the report stresses that India can not only safeguard its workforce but also lead in shaping global AI.

--IANS

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