AI Doesn't Take Toilet Breaks, It Doesn't Spend Money Either

Infosys is getting older. Or so said a recent news report in The Mint, pointing out that in 2025-26, the share of employees under the age of 30 had fallen to 51%, down from 60% in 2021-22.

Another news report in The Mint pointed out that Reliance Industries may have reduced its new hirings “by as much as 90,000” in 2025-26 compared with 2024-25. While Reliance may not be an outright technology firm, it has been betting big on the sector over the years.

In its annual report, Reliance Industries reported a workforce of more than 419,000 employees at end-March 2026, including over 100,000 new hires, largely in artificial intelligence, data science, automation and digital transformation.

Data from staffing firms, cited by a report in The Economic Times suggested that annual fresher intake in the technology sector has fallen by nearly two-thirds, from around 380,000 positions in 2021-22 to about 120,000 in 2024-25.

According to The AIdea of India: Outlook 2026, a report by the Confederation of Indian Industry and EY, technology services firms in India have already reduced 20-25% of entry-level roles through the deployment of automation and artificial intelligence.

The report also noted a shift in hiring patterns. One large information technology services company cut entry-level recruitment by nearly 30%, while increasing mid-career hiring by 20% to fill emerging artificial intelligence-related roles.

In pure consultant speak, this is being called the “diamond shape” workforce – which is leaner at the bottom and broader in the middle.

This change in structure has broken the traditional formula which has worked through the decades – starting from the mid to late 1990s, running through the 2000s and 2010s and to some extent even in the 2020s.

The trick was to go to an average to a good engineering college and get hired en masse by IT companies, and live happily ever after. Of course, the strength of the formula had decreased over the years as one too many engineers with low to below average skills were produced, allowing IT companies to hire even the slightly good ones for extremely low salaries. 

No Toilet Breaks
So, why is the hiring structure at IT companies changing? Why are fewer freshers being hired?

As Jamie Bartlett explains in How To Talk To AI – (And How Not To): “Early career roles appear most vulnerable, since they often involve routine repetitive work that machines can do quite well.”

Or as a February 2026 report published by the Bank for International Settlements points out: “Across broader job roles, junior workers may remain more exposed to automation if their job involves a higher share of routine or AI-substitutable tasks, potentially reducing entry-level opportunities.”

Or as the CII and EY report puts it without being euphemistic: “Digital workers can operate without the need for a raise and can perform routine tasks without resistance.”

Or as this writer has said several times over the years: “Robots don’t take toilet breaks”.

Replace the word robot with artificial intelligence, and the argument stays the same.

Indeed, the breakdown of the formula – where a half-decent education ensured jobs and some prosperity for a lifetime – has led to many parents with kids in their late teens and early twenties getting really worried about the future of work.

They want to know what’s the new formula: What can my kid study to ensure that they continue to be relevant in the age of AI?

More importantly, the larger question in the minds of people is: Will AI destroy jobs? 

Now, this is not the first time that the question of technology destroying jobs has cropped up. It has happened multiple times over the last few centuries. And there are no simple answers.

New technologies destroy jobs – that is what increasing productivity ultimately means. But new technologies also create new jobs and help expand economic activity, which leads to faster economic growth. Nonetheless, as a serious reading of history tells us, this doesn’t necessarily happen simultaneously.

In fact, as Carl Benedikt Frey writes in The Technology Trap – Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation: “There is no way of knowing exactly what jobs the future will bring. At the advent of the Industrial Revolution, nobody could have foretold that many Englishmen would become telegraphers, locomotive engineers, and railroad repairmen. Today, futurologists are just as ill equipped to predict the jobs that AI will create.” This is what history tells us.

Along with this there’s what AI expert Richard Susskind terms “the likely impact of not yet invented systems”. The trouble is any reskilling effort can only take into account what AI can do in a particular field at a given point in time. But AI is constantly improving, sometimes using inputs provided by current employees. Given that, how does one account for this possibility and train for it as well?

What makes the situation worse is the fallacy of composition – the idea that what is good at an individual level is not necessarily good for society as a whole.

In fact, this point is made in a March 2026 research paper titled The AI Layoff Trap authored by Brett Hemenway Falk of the University of Pennsylvania and Gerry Tsoukalas of the Boston University, respectively.

At the level of an individual firm, it may make perfect sense to cut jobs, slow hiring, or recruit fewer people than in the past, while using AI to do more work and boost productivity in the process.

Nonetheless, as Falk and Tsoukalas write: “A problem arises along the way: displaced workers are also consumers, and when their lost income is not replaced, each round of layoffs erodes the purchasing power all firms depend on.”

So, yes, AI doesn’t take toilet breaks, but it doesn’t consume either.

In the Indian case there are entire cities like Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad, which basically have been running on the consumption carried out by IT employees. What will happen to the economies in these cities in the decade to come? How will they evolve?

This is a question that very few experts and public intellectuals are asking. In fact, firms, which are in the business of making profits from what people consume, aren’t asking this basic question either. As Falk and Tsoukalas ask: “If the cliff ahead is visible to all, why would they race toward it?”

But that’s exactly what seems to be happening. No firm and its CEO can be seen to be left out in the AI race. Which is why you see men and women running firms making broad and vague statements about the positive impact of AI that sound very interesting but don’t really mean much.

In fact, the annual reports of firms are now full of long paragraphs presenting AI as a huge opportunity. Which it may well be at the level of an individual firm. But at the level of society, the arithmetic is far less straightforward. And that’s something worth thinking about as well.

Diamond Shaped Firms
There’s another question that the firms don’t seem to be bothered about. How can a diamond-shaped organisation be stable? How can something perpetually be balanced on an edge?

Indeed, as Bartlett writes: “Entry-level roles are not just about tasks: they are also the way tacit know-how and judgement gets passed on… But if there are no more entry-level roles, in a few years there will be no more experienced staff either.”

To conclude, many firms believe that replacing workers with AI will make it more productive and profitable. And individually, they may be right. But collectively, the logic breaks down. Workers are not just a cost to firms; they are also the customers who buy what firms produce – though not necessarily from the same ones. Cities like Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad and many more have been built on that simple fact.

Indeed, if millions of entry-level jobs disappear and incomes stagnate, who will buy the smartphones, stream the movies, order the food, take the flights and pay the EMIs? AI doesn’t take toilet breaks, but it doesn’t consume either. And that may be the biggest AI problem of all.