India's IT Giants Rebrand Old Jobs as AI Roles, Raising Questions About Real Growth

Walk through the job listings on any of India's five largest technology services firms right now, and you'll find thousands of positions stamped with artificial intelligence credentials. Tata Consultancy Services advertises 604 AI-related openings. Infosys lists 1,340. HCL Technologies shows 1,376 roles carrying AI or automation titles. Wipro has at least 350. Tech Mahindra rounds out the group with dozens more. In total, across these five companies that collectively employ roughly a quarter of India's 5.95 million IT workers, there are at least 3,500 positions marketed as AI work.

But a closer look at what these jobs actually entail tells a different story. Most are not new roles born from artificial intelligence's arrival. They are old positions—software developers, data analysts, cloud engineers, business consultants—dressed up in AI language. The work itself remains rooted in traditional technology tasks: software maintenance, data management, cloud infrastructure, business analytics. The difference is that now these jobs require familiarity with AI tools. It is rebranding, not transformation.

This pattern has caught the attention of Bernstein analysts Venugopal Garre and Nikhil Arela, who examined the hiring landscape in early September. "Bulk of the new 'AI' vacancies dotted across employment platforms carry a lot of AI language and buzzwords, but are, in spirit, conventional software, data, cloud, or digital transformation work," they wrote. The observation matters because it cuts against the narrative that artificial intelligence is creating a wave of new employment across India's $300 billion IT sector. If the jobs are not actually new, then the job creation is not actually happening.

The companies themselves frame it differently. Richard Lobo, chief people officer at Tech Mahindra, told reporters that this represents an evolution of existing roles, not rebranding. "Most traditional job roles are increasingly absorbing AI as a skill," he said. "There is currently only a small set of roles that are purely AI focused. For most employees, it is essentially 'what you do, plus AI.'" The other four major firms did not respond to requests for comment. Staffing executives offered a similar defense. Aditya Mishra, managing director and chief executive of CIEL HR, compared the trend to what happened when Java programming emerged decades ago—suddenly many jobs required Java knowledge, but nobody called it a new category of work. "They are doing it because they need the candidate to have knowledge of using an AI tool, writing software, and collaborating with an AI tool," he said.

Yet this rebranding is occurring against a backdrop that complicates the optimistic framing. In the fiscal year ending March 2026, the five largest IT firms cut their combined headcount by 6,981 people. The largest single reduction came from TCS, which laid off approximately 12,000 middle and senior executives in July 2025. Fresher hiring—entry-level positions that typically fuel sector growth—remains depressed. The companies are not expanding their workforce to meet an AI boom. They are contracting it.

Researchers and consultants who work with these firms see a troubling dynamic emerging. Peter Bendor-Samuel, founder of Everest Group, a Dallas-based IT research firm, noted that while repackaging roles as AI-enabled is increasingly common, it creates transparency problems. "Clients are keen to ensure that they are not being charged more for the same services or that the service providers are in fact adopting AI to their benefit," he said. Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research in Massachusetts, was more direct: "It hurts client relationships when providers sell the label rather than the capability." He added that clients have grown sophisticated enough to distinguish between someone who completed an AI certification and someone who has actually deployed AI into complex enterprise environments.

Fersht identified the real tension at work. Companies do not actually want their IT vendors to create new AI roles. They want existing roles to become more efficient—to deliver the same technology and business operations with less human labor. "The real tension is, therefore, not the absence of new roles," Fersht said. "It is providers charging clients for supposedly scarce AI talent, while simultaneously promising that AI will dramatically reduce the human effort required." That contradiction sits at the heart of what is happening across India's IT sector. The firms are marketing scarcity and premium pricing while their own actions—the layoffs, the headcount cuts, the lack of new hiring—suggest they believe the opposite: that AI will do more with fewer people. The question now is how long clients will accept being charged for both sides of that contradiction simultaneously.