There’s a certain irony in the data now circulating through the inboxes of technology journalists. It does not emanate from a think tank or any multilateral institution. Instead, it comes from a US-based building technology company called Planera. A study by this company ranked Malta, an island in the Mediterranean with only 333,000 workers, as the most AI-exposed economy in the world.
This simply means that nearly half of its workforce is working in roles that machines can already mimic. After Malta come Canada, Greece, Cyprus, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United States, Spain, Belgium and Italy.
This tip is counterintuitive. The most pressing disruption will not be in factories, but rather in knowledge and service work. Think routine administration, retail counters, hospitality desks, and back office books. This is where AI has advanced rapidly over the past couple of years.
India does not appear on this list. But this absence does not mean flexibility. For three decades, India’s growth model has been built on a large English-speaking workforce. Think BPO, IT-enabled services, data processing, and customer support. These are not marginal strata of the economy; They are her scaffolding. Unfortunately, it is now beginning to resemble “commodity labour”.
This means that across IT services companies and business process outsourcing (BPO) players, entry-level hiring is being cut back as chatbots and freelance agents take over front-line responsibilities. This is consistent with global estimates from the International Monetary Fund and World Economic Forum, which indicate that about 40% of jobs worldwide are vulnerable to disruption caused by artificial intelligence.
This asymmetry is structural. Some countries will absorb this shock through increased employment and large-scale retraining. Others risk compromising the comparative advantage they enjoyed yesterday.
Conversations with policymakers and industry participants point to a familiar exasperation: The decision-making horizon rarely extends beyond the next election cycle. On the other hand, labor jobs that should have remained competitive have begun to decline as workers return from cities amid continuing shortages of basic services.
So the only sustainable response is to create new categories of work and attract investment into emerging sectors. But the gap between intention and implementation remains wide. Government of Uttar Pradesh $A Rs 25,000-crore note with Bengaluru startup Puch AI, signed in March and positioned as a seed push for AI infrastructure, collapsed within days after due diligence indicated insufficient financial depth. It now stands as a cautionary example of how quickly ambition can outpace ability.
Together, these signals are beginning to shape how parts of the investment community view India’s place in the AI-driven economy. One early-stage investor tracking these shifts put it bluntly: India is starting to look like “the global anti-AI bet,” he said.
This assessment may seem extreme, but its basic logic is difficult to reject. As AI capabilities deepen, India’s reliance on imported chips and electronics is likely to increase. Its software services segment remains tied to platforms and customers outside its control. Employment in routine services faces attrition. Remittances from the Gulf may come under pressure if these economies focus more strongly on automation. Each of these pressures leads to the same result: a more fragile external account.
There are early signs that global capital is responding to this mix. Recently, Zerodha co-founder Nithin Kamath expressed a sentiment he encountered in a conversation with an industry participant: He was told that investor interest in allocating fresh capital to India has “largely faded,” with concerns ranging from limited opportunities associated with AI to rich valuations and macroeconomic exposure. Capital is scanning markets such as Japan, Taiwan, Korea and parts of Europe with greater urgency.
Although the trend has not stabilized yet, it is an early signal worth paying attention to. Conversations with people deep in the policy and business ecosystem reveal a quiet desperation. One young technocrat, who spent several years working on one of India’s largest public technology projects, is now talking about preparing to leave the country. “I will probably leave the country, which I never thought I would do,” he said via WhatsApp.
When asked if he would go on the record, he was more precise: “If you choose to take up the mantle of writing about this, I just want you to know what people actually think. Because we’ve gotten to the point of delusion in this country, where even though you can see the sky falling, you’re being punished for looking up.”
The danger, then, for contemporary India is not the disappearance of work. It is that the categories of work against which they are measured begin to erode faster than new categories are created.
The risk to half of Malta’s workers offers a specific warning. India’s exposure is a completely different matter. The question is not whether a shift is coming; Rather, it is whether India realizes this early enough to respond with intent and implement the plan.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached at assisi@foundingfuel.com)
