A lot of the AI-and-jobs conversation in India swings between two extremes: either AI is quietly wiping out IT jobs, or it's a non-issue. A study released in early 2026 by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), supported by OpenAI, offers a more specific picture than either extreme — and it has direct implications for anyone early in their career.

What the study found

The report, titled "AI and Jobs: This Time Is No Different," surveyed 650 IT firms across 10 Indian cities between November 2025 and January 2026. Its central finding: AI adoption is not showing up as mass layoffs. Instead, it's showing up as a change in hiring mix.

• 55% of firms surveyed reported hiring fewer entry-level staff than before, while 35% reported hiring more — a net slowdown at the entry level, but far from a collapse.
• Mid-level roles look more resilient: 42% of firms reported higher mid-level employment.
• Senior-level staffing was largely unchanged, with 82% of firms reporting no shift.
• 63% of firms said they now want candidates who combine domain expertise with AI or data skills — a hybrid profile the report says is commanding a rising premium.

Notably, the roles often assumed to be most exposed to AI — software developers and database administrators among them — were actually among those with the strongest demand growth, which the researchers read as AI complementing technical work rather than replacing it outright. Firms reported productivity gains outnumbering declines by roughly 3.5 to 1 in divisions that had adopted AI tools. You can read more in Storyboard18's coverage of the ICRIER findings.

The gap: training hasn't caught up

Despite firms wanting AI-literate hires, only 4% had trained more than half their workforce on AI tools in the past year. Cited obstacles included a shortage of qualified trainers, unclear return on investment, cost, and organizational readiness. That gap is an opportunity for job seekers: if companies are struggling to upskill existing staff at scale, arriving already equipped with relevant AI fluency is a genuine differentiator, not just a buzzword on a resume.

What this means if you're job hunting

• If you're a fresher, expect more competition for entry-level roles than a few years ago, but don't read this as AI "taking jobs" — read it as firms raising the bar for what an entry-level hire needs to show on day one.
• Pairing your core domain (finance, healthcare, logistics, whatever your specialization is) with even basic working knowledge of AI tools relevant to that domain is now a more valuable combination than generic AI awareness alone.
• If you're a few years into your career, the data suggests mid-level roles are comparatively safe for now — a reasonable moment to invest in deepening AI-adjacent skills before competition catches up, rather than treating it as urgent.

The honest takeaway is that AI is reshaping who gets hired more than it is eliminating jobs outright — at least for now, and at least in this dataset. That's a real shift, but it's a narrower and more manageable one than the headlines sometimes suggest.