There’s a happy irony in the data currently circulating through technology journalists’ inboxes. It does not come from think tanks or multilateral institutions. Instead, it originates from a US-based construction technology company called Planera. The company’s research ranks Malta, a Mediterranean island with just 333,000 employees, as the world’s most exposed economy to AI.
This simply means that almost half of the workforce already has roles that machines can replicate. Malta is followed by Canada, Greece, Cyprus, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United States, Spain, Belgium and Italy.
This implication is counterintuitive. In that case, the most immediate disruption will not occur on the factory floor, but in cognitive and service operations. Think day-to-day administration, retail counters, hospitality desks, and back office ledgers. AI has advanced rapidly over the past two years.
India is not included in this list. But this absence does not imply resilience. For three decades, India’s growth model has been built on a large English-speaking workforce. Think BPO, IT-enabled services, data processing, and customer support. These are not the economic peripheries. They are its scaffolding. Unfortunately, they are now starting to resemble “commodity labor.”
This means entry-level hiring is being reduced across IT services companies and BPO operators as chatbots and autonomous agents take on front-line responsibilities. This is in line with global estimates from the IMF and the World Economic Forum, which suggest that around 40% of jobs around the world are at risk of being disrupted by AI.
This asymmetry is structural. Some countries will absorb this shock by building up their workforces and retraining them on a large scale. Other companies risk being stuck in yesterday’s comparative advantage.
Conversations with policymakers and industry insiders point to a familiar frustration that decision-making horizons rarely extend beyond the next election cycle. Meanwhile, blue-collar jobs needed to maintain competitiveness are disappearing as workers leave cities amid persistent shortages of basic services.
In that case, the only lasting response is to create new categories of jobs and attract investment into emerging sectors. However, the gap between intention and implementation remains large. Government of Uttar Pradesh INRA 25,000-crore memorandum of understanding with Bangalore-based startup Puch AI, signed in March and positioned as a cornerstone of the company’s AI infrastructure push, was scrapped within days after due diligence pointed to insufficient funding. This now serves as a cautionary example of how ambition can quickly outstrip ability.
Taken together, these signals are beginning to shape how some in the investment community view India’s place in an AI-driven economy. One early-stage investor tracking these changes bluntly described India as starting to look like a “global anti-AI bet.”
That assessment may sound extreme, but the underlying logic is hard to ignore. As AI capabilities deepen, India’s dependence on imported chips and electronics is likely to increase. The company’s software services division remains tied to platforms and clients outside its control. Employment in routine services is facing decline. Remittances from the Gulf could come under pressure if their economies move more aggressively toward automation. Each of these pressures has the same result: more vulnerable external accounts.
There are early signs that global capital is responding to this mix. Nithin Kamath, co-founder of Zerodha, captured a sentiment he encountered in a recent conversation with industry insiders. Investor interest in allocating new capital to India has “almost disappeared”, it said, with concerns ranging from limited AI-related opportunities to high valuations and macroeconomic exposure. Capital is looking more urgently at markets such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and parts of Europe.
While not yet an established trend, this is an early signal worth paying attention to. And conversations with people deep within the policy and business ecosystem reveal a quiet desperation. A young technocrat who spent several years working on one of India’s biggest public technology projects says he is now preparing to leave India. “I will probably leave the country, but I never thought I would do that,” he shared on WhatsApp.
When asked if he would be on the record, he said more precisely: “If you choose to take on the big role of writing about this, I just want you to know what people actually think, because we’ve reached a stage of paranoia in this country where we’re punished for looking up even though we can see the sky falling.”
So the risk for modern India is not that jobs disappear. That is, the categories of works that have expanded in size will begin to decline faster than newly created categories.
The risks to half of Malta’s workforce provide a muted warning. India’s exposure is on a completely different level. The question is not whether that change is coming, but whether India can recognize it early enough, respond with intention, and implement plans.
