നിർമ്മിത ബുദ്ധി ഇന്ത്യയുടെ ഐടി വളർച്ചാ മാതൃക മാറ്റുന്നു; ക്യാമ്പസ് നിയമനങ്ങളിൽ കുറവ് തുടരുന്നു

Nambiar said large IT and BPM companies have cut back on campus hiring over the last three years, which is not expected to change while the industry is in the middle of its shift to AI.

For close to two decades, India's technology industry tried to grow revenue faster than headcount but never quite managed it. Artificial intelligence (AI) has now made that possible, but "not for the same reason which people wanted it, but for a completely different reason", Rajesh Nambiar, president of Nasscom, told The Economic Times Digital during the industry body's BPM Confluence.

The technology industry, for the longest time, followed what Nambiar described as a linear growth model, in which revenue and headcount rose at almost the same rate across IT services and business process management (BPM). Most contracts were billed on a time-and-material basis, which meant companies had to deploy more employees to earn more revenue.

"15-20 years ago, the industry fought very hard. They said, 'we can't be in a linear growth phase'," Nambiar said. "The plan was to build products and other assets that would bring in more revenue without a matching rise in headcount. To be fair, I think the industry never really cracked it. So, it's always linear," he added.

AI has changed that equation by raising productivity and allowing companies to grow revenue without adding employees at the same pace, Nambiar said.

The divergence has become more visible over the past two to three years. Nambiar said the industry's revenue grew by 6.1-6.2% last year, while headcount increased by 3.1%. The sector, which includes IT services, BPM, engineering research and development (ER&D) firms and global capability centres (GCCs), was worth $316 billion at the end of FY26.

"This [divergence] is probably not as stark, but a little similar in the previous year as well. It already began a couple of years ago, and we see that continuing for a while. I think it's important for us to note. There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that it started to diverge. The good news is that we still have growth, even in the employee count," Nambiar said.

However, Nambiar cautioned against attributing the entire gap to AI. "Some of it is also attributed to the efficiency. Some of it is also attributed to the fact that you had a lot of fat in the organisation and that some of them got cleaned up," he said.

Campus hiring to stay weak

Even as headcount growth slows, the industry continues to add employees, although not always in the roles it traditionally hired for, Nambiar said.

"There's still net addition happening. Now, one could argue saying that the net addition is actually happening in a newer area compared to the older area and so on. But that's something for the companies to figure out," he said.

Fresh graduates, however, are likely to find fewer openings in the near term. Large IT and BPM companies have reduced campus hiring over the past three years and Nambiar does not expect a meaningful recovery until the industry completes its shift towards AI.

"Till the transition is completed, it may take a year, two, maybe three. Until that point in time, you're not going to find the kind of hiring which the companies did in the universities and campuses before," he said.

Nambiar said the bigger concern lies in the middle tier of organisations across both BPM and IT. At the same time, he said, graduates entering the workforce today are more comfortable with AI than those who joined three or four years ago.

He expects campus hiring to pick up once companies move beyond the transition because the work of deploying AI across organisations is only beginning.

"Just because you buy access to a frontier model and plug it into your organisation does not make any difference to the organisation," Nambiar said. "The world needs more software than ever it required in the past."

Embedding AI into business processes and customer operations will require more software, technology services and operational support, he said.

"Implementing this technology into those enterprises would require a lot more of this industry than ever before," Nambiar added.

A double squeeze for BPM

The BPM industry also faces pressure from its largest market, the US. In March 2026, the US Federal Communications Commission voted to begin drafting rules for offshore call centres operated by telecom companies.

The proposals include requiring companies to tell customers at the start of a call that it is being handled outside the US, allowing customers to request a transfer to a US-based agent and capping the proportion of calls handled offshore.

A separate bill in the US Congress would require call centres to tell customers when they are speaking to an AI system and allow them to request a human agent based in the US.

Nambiar said Nasscom had been asked to respond to the FCC proposal.

"There will always be protectionism. There will always be things which will start to say that, you know, I don't want these jobs to go out of my country. And we face it all the time," he said. "We'll fight it out."

Nambiar said the world had moved away from globalisation in recent years, but companies had learned to plan for such uncertainty. He does not consider AI a headwind for the industry.

"Most people think that agentic AI is a headwind. And I believe that it's a tailwind for the industry," he said.

Workers will have to reskill

The transition will be more difficult for individual workers. As AI agents take over repetitive tasks, companies will try to move employees into roles that require greater judgment and problem-solving skills. Nambiar acknowledged that not everyone will make that transition.

"Will all of them make it to the new area? The answer is no, obviously. Typically, the organisation will go for how good you are as an individual... So in some sense, it's a pseudo performance evaluation," he said.

While larger companies offer training programmes, Nambiar said employees could not leave responsibility for their careers entirely to their employers.

"You need to be responsible for your own career. You can't outsource that to the organisation," he said.

He added that companies would increasingly value what an employee could do rather than simply how many employees they had.

"If you're at the lower end of the totem pole, if you're answering phone calls and doing something, you better get something else," Nambiar said.