Small talent pool

Skilling efforts need to strengthen as India will have a gap of over a million AI-skilled workers in 2 years

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MICROSOFT AI DIRECTOR Gabriela de Queiroz's emotional note after she along with roughly 6,000 others were laid off recently is a pointer to the fact that the impact of technology on jobs is pretty uniform: it doesn't differentiate between top-tier and bottom-tier employees. In fact, Microsoft's job cuts fell hardest on the people who built the company's products, showing that even software developers are at risk in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).

The job cuts were expected as Microsoft and its rivals are making steep investments in AI and are scrutinising costs and reprioritising budgets. So tools capable of writing or analysing code are automating elements of software development previously done by engineers typing away on keyboards. At Microsoft, as much as 30% of some projects' code is now written by AI.