Sridhar Vembu, Chief Scientist of Zoho Corporation, sought to calm fears about artificial intelligence gutting India’s IT workforce on Monday, arguing that the technology would ultimately create more jobs than it destroys – even as he acknowledged the disruption would be real and the transition messy.
Speaking to Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, Vembu said the anxiety gripping India’s tech sector was understandable but misplaced. “Typically all these technologies create more jobs than they destroy,” he said. “It may not directly be the jobs that they are destroying, but if we are adaptive, we can leverage the opportunities.”
The Engineer’s Dilemma
The concern is not abstract. A recent rout in Indian IT stocks has crystallised fears that AI-driven automation could fundamentally alter the hiring calculus of an industry that employs millions. Vembu, speaking as a software engineer himself, did not dismiss those fears. In his own teams at Zoho, he said, AI coding tools had delivered results so impressive that engineers were left asking an existential question, “So what does it leave us humans?”
His answer was a reorientation, not a reassurance. “Software engineers will evolve to becoming closer to the customer, solving customer problems,” he said. “There’s millions of problems to solve. Let’s solve them.”
It was a notably more measured position than the one Vembu had taken just weeks earlier. During the launch of Anthropic’s coding plugins, he had written bluntlyon social media, “At this point, it is best for those of us who depend on writing code for a living to start considering alternative livelihoods. I include myself in this. I don’t say this in panic, but with calm acceptance and embrace.”
His latest remarks suggest he has since arrived at a more structured view of what that adaptation might actually look like.
The 10-minute delivery jobs segment
To explain how jobs might emerge from disruption in ways that are impossible to predict in advance, Vembu reached for a concrete Indian example. “Take the 10-minute delivery job sector – that ultimately came from the smartphone,” he said. “But when the smartphone arrived, we would not have known that 10-minute delivery would arrive.”
The analogy cuts both ways. Quick commerce created an entirely new category of employment for millions of gig workers – but those were not the jobs anyone was protecting or anticipating when mobile internet arrived. Vembu’s point is that the same logic applies to AI. The jobs it creates may look nothing like the jobs it displaces, which is precisely why he argued India needs “a lot of entrepreneurs who are figuring this out.”
The structural challenge
Vembu was candid that not everything would survive the transition intact. He flagged the SaaS business model specifically – the bread and butter of many Indian software companies – as vulnerable. “The way that package software is sold today, that might change,” he said. “That obviously is a challenge for companies like us.”
On the broader question of whether India was doing enough to generate employment as IT hiring slows, Vembu fell back on structural optimism: an open economy, a strong domestic consumption story, and a young, tech-savvy population. “India is actually the most AI-optimistic country in the world,” he said. “I am an optimist.”
Whether that optimism is earned or premature, job creation will define India’s AI decade more than any summit keynote.
