Artificial intelligence is no longer merely a technological story. It is becoming a labour-market story, a social-stability story and, increasingly, a middle-class survival story. For nearly three decades, countries such as India benefited from a historic global shift in white-collar work. Multinational firms outsourced software development, back-office processing, accounting support, customer service and research functions to a vast English-speaking workforce.

Entire cities were transformed by this model. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Gurgaon emerged as symbols of aspirational India precisely because knowledge work appeared immune to the disruptions that had earlier devastated factory labour. That assumption is now under strain. The first wave of artificial intelligence largely functioned as an assistant. It helped workers write code faster, summarise documents, analyse data and automate repetitive tasks. Companies presented these tools as productivity enhancers rather than job destroyers. But the next stage of AI development is qualitatively different. “Agentic AI” ~ systems capable of independently executing complex tasks with minimal human supervision ~ threatens to alter the economics of white-collar employment itself.

The implications extend far beyond the technology........

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