Source: Bloomberg
India's long-standing competitive advantage—a massive pipeline of affordable engineering talent—is collapsing as AI coding tools compress the value of entry-level programming work. Infosys and its peers face a brutal recalibration: 1.5 million new graduates annually now compete for roles that AI can handle, forcing companies to shift hiring upstream toward architects and AI-prompt specialists rather than junior developers grinding through boilerplate code. The entire labor arbitrage model that powered offshore outsourcing for two decades is inverting, forcing India to compete on capability and judgment rather than headcount and cost.