For decades, tech companies have relied immensely on India’s vast workforce, from entry-level call center jobs to software engineers and high-ranking managerial positions.
But with the advent of advanced AI, which has been accompanied by employers greatly cutting back on hiring with the hopes of eventually automating tasks entirely, India’s tech workers are having to cope with a vastly different reality in 2026.
As Rest of World reports, rising anxiety over the influence of AI, on top of already-grueling 90-hour workweeks, has proven devastating for workers. While it’s hard to single out a definitive cause, a troubling wave of suicides among tech workers highlights these unsustainable conditions.
Complicating the picture is a lack of clear government data on the tragic deaths. While it’s impossible to tell whether they are more prevalent among IT workers, experts told Rest of World that the mental health situation in the tech industry is nonetheless “very alarming.”
The prospect of AI making their careers redundant is a major stressor, with tech workers facing a “huge uncertainty about their jobs,” as Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur senior professor of computer science and engineering Jayanta Mukhopadhyay told Rest of World.
While there are likely a compounding number of reasons why the United States has seen major job cuts, experts point out that entry-level jobs are at the highest risk. India’s IT industry has also been particularly vulnerable, as companies clamor to invest in AI with the hopes of cutting costs by replacing jobs like customer service representatives.
“The traditional consulting role in the service industry is going to be impacted much, much more than traditional product-development companies,” Cornell University IT assistant professor Aditya Vashistha told Rest of World.
Meanwhile, educational institutions in India are continuing to churn out graduates, compounding the issue as jobs become scarcer. India’s biggest private sector employer cut almost 20,000 jobs late last year, indicative of a much broader trend.
Those who remain employed are put under intense pressure to keep innovating. Many of them struggle to separate work from their personal lives. Extended hours and isolation arising from having to work around the clock and across time zones only worsen the situation.
On top of that is the constant threat of being made obsolete by AI, which has driven many workers identified by Rest of World to the brink — and in some cases, over the edge.
It’s a horrifying new trend, highlighting the humanitarian cost of mass layoffs and major technological shifts reshaping roles across industries.
Employers in India, much like many of their counterparts in the US, are tied up in a battle of adapting to a new world order determined by AI — or be left behind.
Even then, the prospects of being employed in IT in the country aren’t looking great.
“The number of people required to work in IT services in the world of AI will be orders of magnitude lower than where we are currently,” Marcellus Investment Managers founder and chief investment officer Saurabh Mukherjea told CNBC earlier this month.
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