This week Mint broke a “big” story
So what was the reveal? Mint scraped jobs tagged with “AI” at major IT companies and concluded:
These jobs are not “AI jobs” - they are regular IT jobs like software, data, cloud, support — with AI tag slapped on for vanity.
That’s a clear misconception on part of Mint. As most industry insiders know, most AI jobs are not about building AI, but building with AI.
And Mint isn’t the only one misreading tech industry. The more I read the headlines, the more I realise:
The mainstream media doesn’t really understand the tech industry.
In this post, let’s look at 4 misreadings media seems to be making about Indian IT industry.
Misreading 1. AI roles = fancy frontier jobs.
What media doesn’t realise is that barring the 2-3% cutting edge AI work, most AI jobs in the industry are about building with AI, not building AI.
They are two different things.
Building AI = working on new AI models and new AI specific tooling.
Building with AI = doing your existing work but now with using AI. The skills and task remain same, only the AI tools and skills get added to the job.
Almost all knowledge work jobs are now the latter. And they are going stronger and they pay more than before. So they are legit AI jobs, even if they are not about researching and furthering AI models.
Misreading 2. AI is leading to mass layoffs across the industry
This one is controversial but hear me out.
First let’s see these headlines:
While the layoffs are real, saying they are due to AI is knee-jerk. See this history of tech layoffs in last 6 years from Valueaddvc:
As you can see above, the biggest layoff year in recent history was 2023. But AI was in early stages at that time. Macro factors like near zero interest rates and past overhiring in 2021-22 caused these layoffs. If AI had been around that time, it would have gotten all the blame perhaps.
And see 2026. AI capabilities are now proven and AI adoption is now massive, but layoffs? If AI productivity was the reason, the layoffs in 2026 must have been way higher than last 2 years.
Coming to AI led productivity. In most teams it still sits closer to ~30%. Useful. But not “delete the department.”
Yes, AI is leading to job losses. But it’s also leading to more jobs. There are hiring surges happening across GCCs and startups that are fast assembling projects for the new market areas. No one writes about them.
Misreading 3: “Senior professionals are losing jobs due to their higher salaries ”
Guardian did a story Inside tech’s AI-fueled manager purge
Gartner’s said: through 2026, a chunk of orgs will use AI to flatten and cut a large share of middle-management roles.
But then look at what companies are increasingly finding after AI.
Meta has been asking some Applied AI ICs to move back into management.
Startups like Moative are calling out on senior executives who will be critical for success of enterprise AI projects
Again, there is clear “AI nuance” for senior roles:
If a senior role was all about managing a team, yes there will be fewer roles for them.
But if seniority is in the context of domain knowledge and business depth, the demand for them is not going away.
Misreading 4: Indian IT has run its course. Bad days for the economy ahead since they used to buy real estate and premium services/goods
With every major Claude or GPT release, media starts churning out headlines like this:
And social media chatter joins in claiming “winter is coming”:
This one is easy to fall prey to.
After all, when it just takes $20 to build software which used to take 5 engineers and 3 months earlier, it looks like IT companies have lost what they used to charge for.
But only industry insiders know that IT partners like Accenture, TCS, Infosys, Deloitte, etc didn’t just offer coding but the entire solutioning, delivery, rollout and maintenance. Yes, AI cuts the cost and time and leads to lower margins - but it still doesn’t eliminate the value these firms are needed to bring in.
That’s why OpenAI and Anthropic are doing their own IT implementation ventures.
If all companies can just use Claude code, why would Anthropic do a services company?
Because, they know that building models is one thing - but taking them to production requires what IT partners have been delivering for last 30 year - solutioning, trust and end-to-end ownership.
Yes, Indian IT industry is undergoing a difficult phase. But it’s not going to be finished. It is getting transformed, repackaged and repriced.
Conclusion
Media does what it needs to - maximise eyeballs by writing headlines that shock and scare us.
But the reality is more nuanced. And it’s more boring - each industry gets threatened, media headlines are written but it keeps reinventing itself and keeps growing.
It happed to newspapers, television, telecom and will keep happening in tech industry as well.
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