AI will hit jobs in Indian IT sector but experts say companies can also be ethical about job cuts
With his recent comments about programming and coding, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sentripples through the IT industry, including in India. Huang is of the belief that AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot are going to be so good at writing code that it will make this particular skill of knowing a programming language like C++ and Java redundant.
He does not talk about job losses, but his comments do hint at it. India Today Tech spoke to experts in the Indian IT industry, and they too believe that AI would hit the workforce in IT companies significantly.
We are already seeing the impact. Three months into 2024 and thousands have already lost their jobs. Layoffs have been especially bad in the global tech sector. As of February 2024, approximately 32,000 tech employees were laid off this year, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website monitoring tech industry job cuts. This was after some major tech companies like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Cisco announced a large number of job cuts this year.
And while no tech company is willing to say that the job cuts are due to AI tools, if we look behind the word “restructuring” that every tech company has used, it does hint that many jobs are increasingly either not required or can be done by fewer people.
This could be the reason why Huang recently said, “It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program, and that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of AI.”
Why the sudden and massive job cuts?
While many companies attribute job cuts to cost-saving and restructuring initiatives, analysts suggest that AI remains a primary driver behind these layoffs. It seems to be happening in two ways. Either AI tools are reducing the need for the number of employees involved in doing something, like we see in the case of Apple and Facebook â there is a need to shut down a few projects and reallocate resources to teams that are involved in developing generative AI technologies. At Apple, this has happened with the company’s EV car project, whereas at Facebook there has been a pivot away from Metaverse.
