India AI jobs outpace losses in Nomura Asia labor study

India AI jobs rose by 83,100 in a Nomura sample, exceeding 31,921 layoffs and attrition as companies rework support and technology roles.

Nomura counts 83,100 hires

Nomura Holdings Inc. economists Sonal Varma and Si Ying Toh analyzed 69 AI labor-market anecdotes across Asia, with most dated between 2022 and August 2026. India produced the largest absolute count in the sample, a scale that makes the country a useful early test of how AI adoption is showing up in employment data, they wrote.

The figures do not claim to measure the whole labor market. Nomura said the sample was built from reported cases in a fragmented regional market, so the totals are indicative rather than comprehensive.

India's exposure is rooted in its role as a services hub for global companies, where call centers, software maintenance and back-office workflows can be split into repeatable tasks. In Nomura's reading, those workflows are where chatbot deployment is meeting demand for engineers who can build or integrate AI tools.

Support roles absorb the cuts

Nomura attributed many Indian reductions to support functions replaced by chatbots, while the hiring cases were concentrated among IT-services graduates tied by employers to AI demand. That split places India inside a labor transition already visible in business-process outsourcing and software services.

The economists described a two-tier labor market in India and Korea: entry-level demand weakens, while employers seek workers with more operating experience and business knowledge. In that reading, the aggregate gain does not remove the strain for workers whose jobs do not map cleanly into AI engineering or data roles.

The study window also matters. Most examples began in 2022, when public AI tools moved quickly into corporate pilots, and ran through August 2026, giving the sample a view of the first wave of adoption rather than a settled labor-market outcome.

Asia totals show uneven damage

Across Asia, Nomura counted 130,758 AI-linked hires, compared with 60,654 lost jobs over the study window. More than 90% of the hires were in technology, while around 60% of the reductions came from financial services.

The sector split matters because the new jobs and lost jobs are not in the same places. A bank back-office worker affected by automation is unlikely to move directly into an AI engineering role without retraining, certification or employer support, Nomura's economists wrote.

India, China and the Philippines showed the same early pattern in Nomura's sample: AI-linked recruitment exceeded reported displacement. In the Philippines, where business-process outsourcing is a large employer, the result points to pressure on routine service tasks alongside demand for technical work linked to AI deployment.

Services model faces retraining test

For India's IT-services companies, the near-term effect depends on whether client demand for AI projects keeps translating into graduate hiring. If that demand holds, companies can add AI delivery teams while shifting routine support work toward software tools.

If client spending slows instead, the same firms could face a narrower path: fewer entry-level openings, more pressure to redeploy support staff and tighter competition for experienced engineers. For the wider industry, that would favor companies with stronger training pipelines and more client work tied to implementation rather than basic maintenance.

The macro channel is labor income. If AI hiring continues to exceed reported displacement, consumption and urban services employment get some cushion; if reductions spread beyond support and finance, policymakers face a harder reskilling problem across Asia's service economies.