New Delhi, June 3 -- Hardly a week passes without fresh headlines about white-collar jobs falling prey to AI. Most recently, Meta Platforms Inc. laid off nearly 8,000 employees globally as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's broader AI-driven restructuring strategy, while LinkedIn announced more than 600 job cuts set to take effect in mid-July. According to layoffs.fyi, 152 tech firms have cut 115,430 jobs so far in 2026.

That number is likely to rise as Generative AI increasingly writes reports, generates code, analyses data, creates presentations and mimics human conversation with startling fluency. AI agents are pushing automation even further by planning, reasoning and carrying out multi-step tasks with minimal supervision.

Optimists argu...