India’s major IT services companies are at a crossroads. Long a springboard for engineering graduates, traditional IT giants absorbed waves of freshers into entry-level roles—coding, customer support, and app maintenance—providing a clear path from novice to expert. However, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation are now fundamentally reshaping this landscape, challenging established norms of early career progression and the sustainability of the talent pipeline.

A recent EY-CII report which surveyed 200 Indian enterprises found that we are moving towards a diamond-shaped workforce: mid-level and specialist roles are expanding, but entry-level hiring is contracting sharply, with a 20-25 percent decline. For India’s 1.3 million engineering graduates, the class of 2026 faces choppy waters. The top five hiring companies are expected to recruit far fewer college students compared to over three-digit numbers per company over two years ago.

AI systems now perform many tasks that once defined junior roles, such as writing code, analysing data, and drafting standard documents. Approximately 64 per cent companies in the EY-CII survey report that AI is being utilised for routine and repetitive tasks. This directly affects the traditional apprenticeship model, which relied on juniors performing “grunt work" in exchange for training and........

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