New Delhi, June 14 -- There are two prominent views in the AI-and-jobs debate. The first warns that we are standing at the edge of a white-collar employment cliff. Artificial intelligence (AI) will replace work across coding, customer support, analytics, legal and medical domains.

This fear is not irrational. Frontier systems have shown striking progress on coding benchmarks and score strongly on reasoning, legal and medical tests, even if their real-world reliability lags.

The counterview argues that we over-attribute layoffs to AI. Many companies over-hired during the pandemic and are now correcting course. AI has become a convenient scapegoat for decisions driven by margin pressure, weak demand and bloated structures. Clear evidence ...