India's rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is opening a new route for women into the country's technology-led economy. Concerns about automation, job losses and the digital gender gap remain, but early evidence shows AI also creating new careers, higher incomes, entrepreneurship and flexible work.

The opening matters because women are still under-represented in tech. NASSCOM puts their share of the technology workforce at about 36%, with far weaker representation in senior roles and emerging-technology fields. Yet AI careers are no longer limited to software engineering. The technology is spreading into marketing, HR, finance, healthcare, education, design and customer service.

Data annotation, the labelling of images and other data so machines can learn to recognise objects such as roads, vehicles and pedestrians, has become an important entry point, especially for educated women with few other options in tech.

According to US-based Scry AI, an estimated 200,000 annotators work in India's villages and small towns, roughly half the world's data-labelling workforce. A NASSCOM report found that over 80% of annotation employees come from rural, semi-rural or underserved backgrounds.

The model is working across several states. Infolks, based in Palakkad, Kerala, creates jobs outside the traditional urban hubs. In Jharkhand, women label data from their villages while balancing farm work. When Tika Data opened a........

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