Indian study puts AI-complementary employment below 8% of workforce

India's chief economic adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran presented a privately authored workforce study in Chennai on October 11. It estimates that fewer than 8% of employed people held jobs where AI could complement their work in 2025.

The report was written by Vidya Mahambare of the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Vivek Jadhav of the Institute of Management Technology in Ghaziabad and Tamil Nadu official Vishnu Venugopalan. Its findings distinguish between work that technology can support and tasks exposed to substitution.

The authors estimate that 46.3 million Indian workers were in AI-complementary occupations, compared with 52.5 million in the United States and 20.9 million in Russia. Although the balance has improved since 2012, employment under substitution pressure still exceeds complementary employment by half.

Routine work exposed to automation increased its share of employment by 4.8 percentage points between 2012 and 2025. AI exposure also varies by age: about 29% of workers aged 25 to 34 are in exposed occupations, compared with roughly 19% among those aged 55 to 64.

The five southern states average 30.9% of employment in AI-exposed occupations. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh range from 16.8% to 20%. Greater exposure in the south does not necessarily mean a more favourable balance between substitution and complementary work.

Nageswaran stressed at the launch that exposure should not be equated with job losses, Financial Express reported. The study describes potential changes in tasks, rather than a count of workers already displaced.