The company, LimeChat, has an audacious goal: to make customer-service jobs almost obsolete. It says its generative AI agents enable clients to slash by 80% the number of workers needed to handle 10,000 monthly queries.
“Once you hire a LimeChat agent, you never have to hire again,” Nikhil Gupta, its 28-year-old co-founder, told Reuters.
Cheap labor and English proficiency helped make India the world’s back office — sometimes at the expense of workers elsewhere. Now, AI-powered systems are subsuming jobs done by headset-wearing graduates in technical support, customer care and data management, sparking a scramble to adapt, a Reuters examination found.
That’s driving business for AI startups that help companies slash staffing costs and scale operations — even though many consumers still prefer to deal with a person.
This account of the disruptive changes transforming India’s $283 billion IT sector is based on interviews with 30 people, including industry executives, recruiters, workers and current and former government officials. Reuters also visited two AI startups and tested voice and text chatbots that handle increasingly sophisticated customer interactions in human-like ways.
Rather than pump the brakes as the technology threatens jobs built on routine tasks, the country is accelerating, wagering that a let-it-rip approach will create enough new opportunities to absorb those displaced, Reuters found. The outcome of India’s gamble carries weight far beyond its borders — a test case for whether embracing AI-driven disruption can elevate a developing economy or render it a cautionary tale.
The global conversational AI market is growing 24% a year and should reach $41 billion by 2030, consultancy Grand View Research estimates.
India — which relies on IT for 7.5% of its GDP — is leaning in. In a February speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said “work does not disappear due to technology. Its nature changes and new types of jobs are created.”
Not everyone shares Modi’s confidence in India’s preparedness. Santosh Mehrotra, a former Indian official and visiting professor at the University of Bath’s Centre for Development Studies, criticized the government for a lack of urgency in assessing AI’s effects on India’s young workforce. “There’s no gameplan,” he said.
Business process management employs 1.65 million workers in call centers, payroll, and data handling in India. Hiring has plummeted due to increased automation and digitalization, despite rising demand for AI coordinators and process analysts, said Neeti Sharma, CEO of staffing firm TeamLease Digital.
Net headcount in the segment, which represents one-fifth of IT output, grew by fewer than 17,000 workers in each of the past two years, down from 130,000 in 2022-2023 and 177,000 in 2021-2022, TeamLease Digital figures show.
Reuters spoke to three current and five former customer-service workers, who described increasing job insecurity and integration of AI, including tools that suggest responses and bots that handle nearly all routine queries autonomously.
Megha S., 32, was earning $10,000 a year at a Bengaluru-based software solutions provider. She said she was laid off last month, just before India’s festive season, as the company moved to implement AI tools to review the quality of sales calls.
“I was told I am the first one who has been replaced by AI,” said Megha, who spoke on the condition that her full name and former employer not be identified. “I’ve not told my parents.”
Sumita Dawra, a former labor ministry secretary who oversaw an Indian government taskforce on AI’s impact on the workforce before retiring in March, said while the technology offered productivity gains that would lead to new jobs, India could consider stronger social security measures, such as unemployment benefits, to help those displaced during the transition.
However, a senior Indian official told Reuters the government believed AI would ultimately have little impact on overall employment. India’s IT and labor ministries, and Modi’s office, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/india/meet-ai-chatbots-replacing-indias-call-center-workers-2025-10-15
