Purva Jagtap graduated from her engineering college in India this year with a degree she expected would land her a dream job at a tech hub, perhaps one run by a big Wall Street bank. Her family had paid about $5,640 in tuition, twice the average annual salary in the country, hoping it would launch her corporate career.
Instead, the 22-year-old is spending her days applying for jobs and competing with thousands of other graduates for entry-level roles that India’s so-called Global Capability Centers once minted by the millions. Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing that equation.
Inside the glass towers of GCCs in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune, banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are automating much of the work that once formed the bottom rung of the tech ladder: checking loan documents, reconciling accounts, writing basic code and invoicing.
“I am worried that AI might reduce the number of entry-level jobs because it can do many things faster,” said Jagtap, who graduated from D.Y. Patil University. “Getting that first opportunity is already difficult because there are so many people applying for the same jobs.”
AI is upending labor markets around the world, yet few countries have as much at stake as India, long considered a nation of coders. The information technology services sector employs about 6 million people and accounts for nearly 8% of the economy. About 40% of those workers, or 2.4 million, work in GCCs, which generated about $100 billion in revenue last fiscal year, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies and the Zinnov-Nasscom India GCC Landscape Report 2026. The GCCs have grown so much that banks including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have more employees in India than anywhere else outside the US.