The Jobs Did Not Disappear. The First Rung Did.
Technology companies announced around 163,000 job cuts worldwide in the first eight months of this year. AI was cited as a factor in roughly 91,000 of them. The first quarter alone was the heaviest since early 2024.
In India the numbers are smaller and quieter. Estimates for IT sector losses this year run somewhere between 18,000 and 35,000, and a large share arrived without any announcement at all. Performance-linked exits. Restructuring. A conversation in a meeting room and a last working day three weeks later.
So far this reads like every other story about AI taking jobs. Here is where it stops.
Hiring is up
Not down. Up.
India's white-collar hiring rose three per cent year on year at the start of 2026. Business process services grew 21 per cent. Hospitality 15. Insurance seven. Healthcare five. Roles in AI and machine learning grew 34 per cent. Fresher hiring grew eight. Indian multinationals increased IT hiring by 32 per cent even while the sector overall dipped. Global capability centres are expected to add well over a lakh net new roles this year, which is more than the sector is cutting.
Both of those paragraphs are true at the same time, and the gap between them is the whole story.
What actually went
The losses are not spread evenly across the workforce. They are concentrated in a band: roughly three to eight years of experience, in quality assurance, tier-one support, coordination roles, legacy enterprise work. Jobs where the task was well-defined and the output was checkable.
That is not a random slice. That is the bottom of the ladder and the first few rungs above it.
The economy did not shrink. It stopped hiring the people who had not yet proved anything, and carried on hiring the people who had. NASSCOM reckons India needs around 1.2 million AI professionals by 2027 and has about 420,000. The demand is enormous. It is demand for people who are already good.
So a graduate reads that hiring is up and cannot find a job. A senior architect reads that AI is destroying tech and gets three offers. Neither of them is wrong about what they are seeing.
Who this actually lands on
Here is the part that matters, and it is not really about AI.
The people losing the first rung are the people with the least capacity to wait. No savings to speak of. A network that consists of their own batch, who are also looking. Often a family expecting the salary to start, not stop. Frequently a city they moved to for the job and cannot afford without it.
Meanwhile the advice aimed at them assumes the opposite. Reskill. Build something on the side. Take a year to become the kind of person the market now wants. Every one of those requires runway, and runway is precisely what the first rung was supposed to provide.
This is the uncomfortable symmetry. The people who most need time to build an alternative are the people with the least of it, and the people who have plenty of it mostly do not need one.
What can actually be built
Not a transformation. Four specific things, none of them inspiring.
Money that arrives from somewhere other than one employer, even if it is small. Proof of work that exists outside a company's internal systems, which means something public you can point at. A record, filed and documented, because an undeclared income does not exist to any lender or any visa officer. And enough saved to say no to one bad offer.
That list is short on purpose. It is not a career plan. It is the minimum set of things that convert a person who has to accept what is offered into a person who can decline it.
What I am not going to claim
I teach people to build YouTube channels. So let me be clear about what that cannot do.
If you were let go last month, a channel will not help you. Monetisation takes somewhere between one and six months with good execution, and meaningful income takes considerably longer than that. Anyone selling it to a recently unemployed person as a solution is selling, and they know it.
The honest version is less saleable. Build it while you still have the job. The salary is not the thing you are escaping; it is the thing funding the attempt. That advice is useless to the person who needs it most, which is exactly why it has to be said to the people who do not need it yet.
I would rather lose the sale than pretend otherwise.
The bigger thing
None of this substitutes for the actual fix.
Someone has to be willing to hire and train juniors again. Companies spent two decades treating entry-level roles as a cost to be optimised and are now discovering that senior people are produced by junior roles and cannot be ordered separately. Training systems have to produce the skills the demand is pointing at rather than the ones that were scarce five years ago. Those are structural problems and they will take years.
The students graduating into this cannot wait for any of it, and telling them to build a side income is not an answer to a policy failure.
What it is, is the only part of the problem that does not require anyone else's permission to start on. The rest of it needs companies to change how they hire and institutions to change what they teach. This part needs a Tuesday evening.
That is a very small claim. I am making it anyway, because the alternative on offer is to wait.
About the Author
Rudra Pratap Singh is the founder of New Money Matrix and a YouTube automation expert. He has trained 10,000+ creators who've generated ₹4 Crore+ in earnings.
With 8+ years Experience, Rudy specializes in helping creators build automated YouTube channels without showing their face.
Student results shown are individual experiences, not typical results, and are not a guarantee of earnings.