Outsourcers in India will lose their jobs in the next year or two

Most outsourced programmers in India will lose their jobs in the next year or two, said Emad Mostak, CEO of Stability AI.

Mostak, speaking at a meeting with UBS analysts, said that most of the outsourced programmers in India will lose their jobs because, as a result of the development of artificial intelligence, it has become possible to develop software by far fewer people.

“I think it affects different types of jobs differently,” Mostak said in a phone call with analysts at a Swiss investment bank last week.

“If you’re doing work on a computer and no one ever sees you, then that can change drastically because these models are like really talented graduates.”

However, according to Mostak, not everyone will be affected equally.

To a large extent, this is due to differences in the rules and regulations in force in different countries of the world. For example, countries with tighter labor laws, such as France, are less likely to experience similar consequences.

In India, according to Mostak, “outsourcing coders down to third-level programmers will disappear in the next year or two, while in France you will never fire a developer.”

“So in different countries it affects different patterns in different sectors in different ways.”

According to Bloomberg, there are more than 5 million programmers in India who are most exposed to the threat of advanced AI tools such as ChatGPT.

Asia’s second largest country is one of the top destinations for companies that outsource back office and other functions overseas. Silicon Valley tech giants, Wall Street banks, airlines and retail chains are all clients of Indian outsourcing companies.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an Indian multinational information technology and consulting services company, is the country’s largest outsourcing provider. Other companies include Infosys and Wipro.

TCS has made a big bet on generative artificial intelligence, committing to train more than 25,000 engineers on the technology using Microsoft’s Azure Open AI service to “help customers accelerate adoption of this powerful new technology.”

In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, the CEO said the company began taking a “machine approach” to project execution about four years ago, showing that AI will have “a huge impact on how we work and how we do things.” Generative AI, he says, “just pushed that forward a few years.”

Mostak reiterated his previous statement that in five years “there would be no more programmers”, but he misspoke that he was referring to coders in the traditional sense.

“Why write code by hand where a computer can write it better? If you break down programming, from bug checking to unit testing to idea generation, then AI can do it all, only better,” Mostak said.

But he will not do this automatically, but as a “co-pilot,” Mostak said. “This means that less people are needed for classical programming, but are they then needed for other things? That’s the question, and that’s the balance that we need to understand, because different areas are also affected in different ways.”