Fresher hiring across the Indian IT sector has fallen from roughly 600,000 in FY22 to about 120,000 in FY25, an 80 per cent decline in three years per industry tracker Xpheno. TCS, which historically averaged 40,000 fresh graduates a year, plans to take in about 25,000 this year after laying off 12,000 in July 2025. Wipro has cut its fresher guidance from 10,000 to about 8000. Tech Mahindra has openly said it would rather redeploy existing talent than hire fresh. Industry body NASSCOM has pegged workforce growth at just 2.3 per cent in FY26. The reason is installed right on every developer’s laptop. A mid-level engineer with Cursor or Claude Code now does in an afternoon what a three-person offshore fresher team used to do in a sprint.
AI Has Its Own Reckoning
There is also a twist in this story. Even as AI thins the fresher bench, companies are quietly pulling back on their own AI spending. MIT’s Project NANDA reported that 95 per cent of enterprise generative AI pilots never reached production. S&P Global found that 42 per cent of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025. Morgan Stanley mapped the S&P 500 and found that only 21 per cent could point to a measurable AI benefit. A May 2026 survey of enterprise decision makers found that 74 per cent of firms which deployed customer facing AI agents were forced to roll them back.
This does not mean AI is overhyped. It means automation without judgment breaks right at the moment it meets production. And that is precisely why human oversight has become more valuable. The freshers who can make AI deliver a measurable result will still command a premium.
The question is if freshers can design an agentic workflow, write evals, debug a context window or stitch together an API agent that survives contact with production? That is the conversation in our hiring rooms and the candidates who can speak that language are getting offers well above the old market average. India already commands 16 per cent of the global AI talent pool, projected to hit 1.25 million by 2027. Naukri’s JobSpeak Index recorded 17 per cent growth in 0 to 3 year hiring in February 2026, almost all of it AI adjacent. The jobs exist, but they are not the same as in the past decade.
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