The Concern of Layoffs Amid Growing Intelligence - For Now, Despite AI, There is Net Job Gain in US and India

A layoff is one line in a spreadsheet. Inside a household, it is a postponed surgery, a missed EMI, a child's school fee suddenly uncertain. Across India and the United States, the last four years have unsettled a comfortable belief — that qualifications and tenure guarantee safety. The honest picture, though, is neither collapse nor calm. It is uneven distress sitting inside overall growth — and, for now, despite the rapid spread of AI, both economies are still posting net job gains.

America, year by year

The US tracks two different things that get confused constantly: Challenger's announced corporate job cuts, and government payroll data showing net employment change. In 2022, employers announced 363,824 job cuts, yet the economy still added 4,526,000 net payroll jobs. In 2023, announced cuts nearly doubled to 721,677, while net gains slipped to 2,515,000. In 2024, cuts rose again to 761,358, with net gains falling further to 1,459,000. Then came 2025: announced cuts jumped to 1,206,374 — more than triple the 2022 figure — while the net gain shrank to a mere 116,000 jobs.

The trend is unmistakable: announced cuts roughly tripled from 2022 to 2025, while the net hiring gain collapsed by 97% over the same stretch. 2025's cuts were the worst since 2020's pandemic shock and the seventh-highest since records began in 1989 — with government retrenchment alone contributing 308,167 announcements, so this wasn't only a tech correction. Yet net payrolls still grew, if barely. And 2026 has brought relief: January–August announced cuts fell 41% year-on-year to 529,914, while payrolls added 643,000 — though August's 4.1% unemployment rate says nothing about whether a laid-off manager found a comparable salary or moved cities to take a lesser one.

Is this normal? By the announcement count, no — 2025 was genuinely exceptional. By the broader government churn measure (21.24 million total layoffs and discharges in 2025, a 1.1% average monthly rate, actually below 2019's 1.2%), no — ordinary turnover stayed unremarkable. Both things are true at once: corporate headline-grabbing cuts were historically severe; the economy's underlying churn was not.

India: a thinner, harder-to-read picture

India has no equivalent single national layoff series — a real data gap. What exists is startup-sector tracking, which shows about 18,000 reported layoffs by December 2022, over 17,000 in 2023, dropping to just over 9,000 in 2024, and holding roughly steady at 9,500-plus in 2025.

Startup layoffs roughly halved after the 2022–23 peak and have since plateaued — but this covers a sliver of India's workforce and cannot be compared directly to US totals without producing a false ranking. Meanwhile Nasscom estimates the broader technology industry added 60,000 net jobs in FY2023–24, 126,000 in FY2024–25, and projects 135,000 for FY2025–26 — genuine net hiring even as specific companies cut staff. The national labour survey showed employment rising from 56.2 crore (July–September 2025) to 57.4 crore (October–December), before settling to 56.6 crore by April–June 2026 — a series with visible seasonal noise, not a clean upward line.

Job quality is India's sharper worry: only 23.6% of workers held regular wage or salaried jobs in 2025 (up marginally from 22.4%), while 56.2% were self-employed — a category spanning genuine entrepreneurs and people quietly pushed back into unpaid family work after losing a salary. Youth unemployment sat at 9.9%. India also needs roughly 78.5 lakh new non-farm jobs every year to 2030, per its own Economic Survey — a bar the current pace of additions has not clearly cleared.

Good figures or bad figures?

Neither headline extreme fits. This is not universal employment collapse — both countries kept adding net jobs through the period. But it is not business-as-usual either: America's 2025 announcement wave was historically severe, and India's job quality — the shift toward self-employment and precarity — is a genuine deterioration hiding inside positive top-line numbers. The fairest verdict: serious, unevenly distributed insecurity, not a broken economy.

And AI — for now, despite it, there is net job gain

Here the evidence supports a clear, if careful, conclusion: for now, despite the rapid rise of AI, both economies are still producing net job gains. US employers explicitly cited AI for 54,836 job-cut announcements in 2025 — about 4.5% of the total; a real but modest slice, self-reported by employers rather than independently proven as the true cause. Yet US payrolls kept growing through the same period (+116,000 in 2025, +643,000 through August 2026), and India's tech sector kept adding net jobs (126,000 in FY25, 135,000 projected for FY26) even as AI adoption accelerated across both economies. That genuinely challenges the fear that automation must immediately shrink total employment — so far, it hasn't.

Two honest caveats belong alongside that conclusion. First, "despite AI" does not mean "because of AI" — the same net gains might have been even larger without AI in the mix, so we cannot yet say AI has created more jobs than it has displaced, only that overall employment has kept rising as it has spread. Second, the aggregate numbers say nothing about whether the new jobs match the old ones in pay or security — a laid-off software engineer cannot simply become a nurse, and a growing tech sector's hiring says little about the mid-career developer it just let go.

So the fair, present-tense verdict is this: for now, despite AI's expansion, net job gains have continued in both countries. Whether that holds as AI capability keeps advancing over the next few years is genuinely open — and deserves tracking with real data, not assumption in either direction.