New Delhi, Nov. 23 -- We've all heard the warnings. Artificial intelligence, for all the improvements it brings, has long carried a red flag: it might take our jobs.

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate, widely referred to as the 'godfather of AI', even advised people earlier this year to "train to be a plumber". Turns out, the threat of AI slashing jobs is not far away.

Last week, my colleague Jas Bardia crunched some numbers to find that this year, India's 1.3 million-strong engineering graduates have fewer mass recruiters to fall back upon. This is a problem: India's top IT services firms, such as TCS, Infosys and HCLTech, are India's biggest tech employers. Yet, in the first six months of this fiscal, the top 10 IT firms hired just 4...