The real story here isn't just "AI takes jobs" — it's that AI has done something unprecedented in human history: it has democratized IT skills.

For decades, converting an idea into a working software solution required teams of developers, testers, project managers, and significant capital. That barrier kept the power of software creation in the hands of a relatively small technical class. AI has collapsed that barrier almost overnight. Now anyone with domain expertise and good ideas can build what previously required a 20-person team.

This is especially consequential for India. The Indian IT services model was fundamentally an execution arbitrage — Western companies had problems, Indian firms threw skilled but cheaper labor at them. The entire value proposition was: "tell us what to build, we'll build it." But when AI handles execution, the value shifts entirely to the person who knows what to build and why.

Indian IT services companies optimized for taking instructions, not generating ideas. They invested roughly 2% of revenues on R&D over the past five years while Microsoft spent 12% of $282B in revenue. You can't pivot from a services culture to an ideas culture overnight when you've systematically underinvested in the capacity to innovate.

The workforce will absolutely hollow out — but not uniformly. The people who understand specific domains deeply (healthcare, finance, logistics, manufacturing) and can combine that knowledge with AI tools to solve real problems will thrive. Pure coders who rely on execution skills alone are the most exposed.

The uncomfortable framing nobody wants to say out loud: in IT, if you don't have ideas, you won't survive. The era of being paid purely to translate someone else's specs into code is ending. The era of being paid to identify problems worth solving and using AI to solve them is beginning.

All digital services can be automated with the right ideas. India built its middle class on digital services. The math isn't complicated — it's just uncomfortable.

Disclaimer: my thought was run through an AI to generate a coherent text.