India's outsourcing industry is worth $300bn. Indian technology stocks have seen an unprecedented rout over the past few weeks over fears of artificial intelligence upending the traditional outsourcing model that powers the country's $300bn (£223bn) back-office industry. The sell-off - part of a global correction in traditional software and IT stocks - preceded the market nervousness caused by recent geopolitical uncertainty, and is particularly significant for India. Over the past three-and-a-half decades, India's software industry has created millions of white-collar jobs, spawning a new middle class driven by high ambition and strong purchasing power. This, in turn, has fuelled demand for apartments, cars and restaurants across top-tier cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Gurugram over the past 30 years.

Artificial intelligence is becoming a permanent element in the world of work, with Silicon Valley calling it the dawning of a new age. Many people are afraid of losing their job, but Germany is well-prepared. In the northern part of the U.S. state of Louisiana, right next to the prison on the outskirts of Shreveport, looms a gigantic building of concrete and steel. Welcome to the future," reads a colorful greeting painted on the wall at the entrance, right next to the obligatory American flag. It is 9:30 a.m., a busy time of day. Yet the halls and corridors of SHV1, as the building is referred to internally, are completely empty of people. A blueprint for the future," as the site manager calls it. The Seattle-based company operates the largest fleet of industrial robots in the world, more than a million of them, and many are outfitted with artificial intelligence, helping them to lift, sort, search, weigh and scan. Guided and directed completely by AI. Without the massive use of this technology," says Aaron Parness, a former NASA aerospace engineer who now heads up the retail giant's AI robotic department, we would be a different company." The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 41/2025 (October 2nd, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL. Amazon, though, also employs people. But their role is changing rapidly.

I was struck by her pessimism, which she told me was shared by friends from California to Georgia to New Hampshire. In an already fragile world, one increasingly beset by climate change and the breakdown of the international order, AI looms in the background, threatening young people's ability to secure a prosperous future. Just a few days before our drive, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was telling the US Federal Reserve's board of governors that AI agents will leave entire job categories "just like totally, totally gone." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios he believes AI will wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company will eliminate jobs in favor of AI agents in the coming years. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told staff they had to prove that new roles couldn't be done by AI before making a hire.

Adopting and implementing digital automation technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) models such as ChatGPT, robotic process automation (RPA), and other emerging AI technologies, will revolutionize many industries and business models. It is forecasted that the rise of AI will impact a wide range of job functions and roles. White-collar positions such as administrative, customer service, and back-office roles will all be impacted by AI-fueled digital automation. The adoption of digital workers is currently positioned in the early adopter phase of the product lifecycle.1 AI-driven digital workers are expected to substantially alter many white-collar tasks, including finance, customer support, human resources, sales, and marketing.42 A study from Oxford University and Deloitte predicts AI is a significant risk to the white-collar workforce.

Generative AI is transforming many industries, including entertainment, manufacturing, automotive, and knowledge-based. In knowledge-based industries, it has the potential to automate certain tasks, such as generating legal documents and automating financial analysis, that can increase the productivity of knowledge workers. A report by Research and Markets states generative AI is projected to become a $200.73 billion market by 2032. Recently, Bill Gates, in his blog post, said, "In the future, ChatGPT will be like having a white-collar worker available to assist you with various tasks," But since generative AI is still in its early stages, it has limitations and unintended consequences. While it can perform tasks, it cannot replace the reasoning abilities and cognitive flexibility of humans essential to white-collar knowledge work.

The coming artificial intelligence economic revolution will be a major shock to the world. There is a serious possibility that the next decade will bring about a series of social and economic changes akin to the Industrial Revolution and the advent of the internet combined. Many writers, human resource officers, lawyers, writers, artists, and even coders increasingly will be replaced by AI as the "laptop class" of workers is decimated. At the same time, blue-collar workers who work with their hands will enjoy job security; their services cannot be replaced by technology. Unfortunately for waves of young people, the media's advice to "learn to code" may have been like investing in typewriters.

Think AI is just coming for customer service jobs? Think again, say AI experts, who point to recent advances in large language models as evidence that white-collar and professional jobs will be disrupted too. Figuring out how AI and humans will coexist in the workplace is shaping up to be a key conversation for 2023 and beyond. "I think there are traditional white-collar businesses, white-collar professions that are going to be transformed by some of the innovation in large language models and AI technologies," said Peter Wang, the CEO of Anaconda, a provider of data science tools. "And that is going to create really interesting social and cultural dynamics that will basically settle out over the rest of this decade and reverberate into the 2030s."

Artificial intelligence (AI) could be the most transformative technology in the history of mankind--and we may not even see much of this sweeping change coming. That's because we often overestimate what technologies can do in five years, and underestimate what they will be able to do in 20. As I've traveled the world talking about this subject, I'm constantly asked, "what will the future hold for humans and AI?" This is an essential question for this moment in history. Some believe that we're in the midst of an "AI bubble" that will eventually pop, or at least cool off.

The encroachment of automation and robotics into the workplace has forced us to rethink the way that certain jobs are done, and it has produced anxiety about whether there will be enough jobs in the future for the human workers who need them. So far, much of the attention has focussed on blue-collar work, as factory assembly lines and warehouses have adopted automated processes more quickly and visibly than other industries. Automation on a factory floor evokes a simple image: robotic arms assembling parts into Tesla cars; mobile robots driving pallets of goods through Amazon distribution centers. In either scenario, the impact on human workers is easy to see. What is harder to visualize is how similar technology might find its way into the aspects of human labor that are invisible and not as easily routinized, such as complex decision-making, strategic planning, and creative thought.

Lots of math, science, technology and business roles involve, say, operating a power plant to maximize energy efficiency, or running an ad campaign to minimize cost per click,