John J. Kennedy | Online Job Ads Flourishing… Are Those Exposed to AI Hiring More?

A recent analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) of more than one billion online job advertisements across six continents found that companies most exposed to Artificial Intelligence are expanding their workforces faster than those less exposed. Between 2018 and 2025, the headcount at the most AI-exposed quarter of large global firms grew by over 52 per cent, compared with 36 per cent for the least-exposed quarter.

Much of the discussion has focused on what this means for employment. For India’s universities and colleges, however, another finding in the report deserves closer attention.

PwC’s data shows that AI-exposed jobs are being restructured into two distinct categories rather than simply growing or shrinking. In one set of AI-exposed roles, the more skilled task has been automated, leaving the human worker with lower-level residual work, what PwC calls “democratisation”. In the other, routine tasks such as screening, filing and data entry are automated, leaving workers with more complex, judgment-intensive responsibilities -- “professionalisation”. The report’s EPOCH score, which measures how strongly job listings emphasise capabilities such as empathy, creativity and independent judgment, shows that AI-exposed jobs place significantly greater weight on these capabilities than other jobs. This divide is not random. Professionalised roles increasingly reward workers with strong analytical, communicative and judgment-based skills, while democratised roles are associated with weaker wage growth and fewer opportunities for skill development.

This places Indian higher education at the centre of the problem. Millions of graduates enter India’s formal services sector, such as IT, BPO, financial services and healthcare administration, under the assumption that a degree and on-the-job experience will build expertise over time. AI is now automating many of the routine tasks through which that expertise was traditionally acquired. If entry-level work no longer functions as a training ground, the responsibility for developing analytical, communicative and judgment-based capability shifts to the college years.

Most Indian higher education institutions are not currently built for that shift. Across much of Indian higher education, curricula remain oriented towards procedural, syllabus-bound learning -- much of it routine cognitive work that AI can increasingly replicate. Assessment systems still reward recall and standardised output over independent judgment, applied reasoning and ambiguity-tolerant problem-solving, the very capabilities the EPOCH score suggests the market increasingly values. Nor is the risk evenly distributed across institutions. Well-resourced universities and colleges, particularly those with strong industry linkages, research exposure and faculty capacity to redesign pedagogy, are better positioned to shift towards capability-building education. Colleges serving first-generation learners and students from smaller towns, already constrained by limited faculty, infrastructure and curricular flexibility, risk producing graduates equipped for democratised rather than professionalised roles. In other words, the AI divide identified by PwC in the labour market could replicate itself within institutions before students even enter the workforce.

Other countries are already treating this as a curriculum problem rather than only a workplace one, and the contrast with India is useful. Singapore’s approach links AI pedagogy to social resilience through coordination among universities, AI Singapore and the Skills Future programme, which uses AI-driven tools to personalise learning and re-skilling. The emphasis is not merely on teaching students to use AI tools but on building the judgment-based capabilities that complement them, backed by sustained coordination between government, industry and academia. In the United States, some universities have moved from optional exposure to mandatory capability-building. The Ohio State University now requires every student to learn how to use AI tools, treating AI literacy as a baseline competency rather than an elective. Europe has approached the issue through regulation. The EU AI Act introduces compliance requirements for high-risk AI systems, including those used in admissions, assessment and student evaluation, forcing institutions to examine not only how they teach but also how AI is used in educational decision-making. India has its own reforms in the National Education Policy 2020, which promotes flexible, learner-centred degree structures and treats artificial intelligence as central to curricular innovation and system-wide modernisation. Complementary initiatives such as the National Digital Education Architecture and AI for All seek to support this transition. But India’s reform agenda is not without shortcomings. Uneven implementation and resource constraints could widen the institutional divide described above.

A few shifts seem necessary to avoid that gap. Curriculum reform must move beyond adding AI or coding electives towards embedding analytical reasoning, communication and judgment-based learning across disciplines, not just technical ones. Assessment reform matters just as much; as long as examinations reward memorisation over reasoning, classroom incentives will continue to run counter to what the labour market increasingly demands. Institutions serving less-resourced students need targeted investment in faculty development and pedagogy redesign, not just infrastructure, to prevent the emergence of a two-tier higher education system mirroring PwC’s two-tier labour market. Higher education policy also needs to engage with workforce restructuring as a distinct challenge, separate from employability statistics or placement percentages. The question is not simply whether graduates get jobs, but whether the education they receive prepares them for jobs that build capability rather than merely provide employment.

The PwC report suggests AI is unlikely to lead to mass unemployment in the near future. Instead, it is taking over the routine tasks through which workers traditionally built expertise. That raises a hard question for India’s higher education system: is it preparing graduates for roles that build capability, or for roles that will increasingly ask less of them? That is as much a curriculum and pedagogy question as an economic one, and it deserves equal urgency in India.

The writer is retired professor and former dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Christ University in Bengaluru