Where AI is creating jobs for humans – for a while

KARUR, India – Evidence of the artificial intelligence boom often looks like the squat, windowless data centres that house acre after acre of hardware. But near the southern tip of India, the city of Karur is teeming with signs of AI’s ascendancy in human form.

Hundreds of tech lab workers clog the streets on coffee breaks late on any given weekday afternoon – men and women in their 20s, corporate ID cards dangling from lanyards around their necks. Others work a few hours a weekend from home, supplementing their income by strapping iPhones to their heads and pressing record while they chop vegetables or make the bed.

They work in a fast-growing field of AI called data annotation, which – for the moment, at least – requires a human touch. As the sentient backstop for artificial intelligence, data annotators help fix bugs and find blind spots in AI models, improving and refining the programs that steer your car, automate an assembly line and track inventory in retail stores.

The work can be rote and less complex than what engineers train for in college, requiring hours in front of a screen to examine video frame by frame. But as AI capabilities change how companies design and produce products – making jobs like coding disappear for college graduates – data annotation is showing how countries like India, with entry-level job shortages and large youth populations, are adapting.

Aiswarya Palaniswamy, a 25-year-old with a master’s degree in data analytics, found a job in 2025 with the Karur-based Objectways Technologies, a data-annotation firm whose clients are mainly US companies using AI in their products. Objectways employs 2,600 people – 300 of whom were hired in the last month.

“There will always be data. There will always be information,” Palaniswamy said, sounding confident she had found a job that would be resilient at a time when AI has automated jobs like payroll and data entry that workers in India used to fill. She and her co-workers watch footage of products in the rapidly expanding physical AI space, including self-driving cars and humanoid robots, and note in each frame how well the AI model is performing its task.

Objectways’ skilled entry-level office jobs pay about US$210 (S$267) to US$260 a month – a comfortable salary in a small Indian city like Karur, with around 440,000 people. The unskilled work of recording yourself at home pays US$2.50 an hour for usable footage and is done on a freelance basis.

In India, finding steady employment for a rapidly growing population of young adults – some two million Indians turn 18 each month – is particularly pressing for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his governing Bharatiya Janata Party.

The lack of opportunity for young people was an animating impulse behind the “cockroach” protests over education that erupted in July. Modi, who has promised to lead India into a golden era of prosperity and modernisation, offered a rare concession and replaced his education minister. But the underlying anger over the lack of skilled jobs for graduates is not so easy to resolve.

While data-annotation companies like Objectways do much of their work for companies outside India, the Modi government would rather see home-grown AI businesses developing their own applications so the economic impact is greater.

S. Krishnan, who leads the country’s information and technology ministry, said in an interview that India has an opportunity to deploy its biggest resource – its 1.4 billion people – in the parts of the AI economy where a particular kind of human knowledge is necessary. That can involve jobs such as translating the many languages spoken in India or monitoring patients in an intensive care ward, both of which are being done by Indian companies today, he said.

India should avoid adding too many AI jobs that could go away, just as the back-office jobs did, Krishnan added. “We have to look for higher-value-added jobs.”

As many as 1.5 million jobs in information and technology services could disappear because of disruption from AI, according to a 2025 report from a government think-tank.

The range of activities that artificial intelligence can make more efficient is vast. So are the entrepreneurial opportunities.

At Objectways’ labs in Karur, which two New York Times reporters visited in July, many workers spend their days annotating data for a humanoid robot designed to perform household chores. Other projects include work on a device that can help blind people by telling them what their surroundings look like.

One recent morning, a worker in a test kitchen operated a pair of robotic pincers with cameras attached to them so Objectways could record and then analyse videos of how they performed various household tasks – picking up plates, unscrewing the top of a water bottle and pouring its contents into a cup, arranging food. Employees repeated these tasks in Objectways’ test bathroom and bedroom.

“We are giving the robot the data and saying, ‘Learn from this’,” said Ravi Rajalingam, the founder and chief executive officer of Objectways.

He became interested in the field after working with a lending company to streamline its application process with AI. He started Objectways in his hometown, Karur, in 2019, seeing an opportunity to put recent graduates to work. His wife hired their first 20 employees, he said.

“India is no longer the back office for the world,” Rajalingam said. He acknowledged that many of his positions do not require engineering degrees, but added: “It is technical, and they can learn about models of AI.” Many employees work their way up the ladder, he said.

Mohamed Afsar, 29, has been promoted and now oversees 600 employees working on projects at the company’s offices in Coimbatore, a larger city about 2 1/2 hours west of Karur. “It’s an immense process, and we need a huge workforce,” he said.

Afsar, who grew up nearby and was the first person in his family to attend college, said that 200 people can process 70 hours of video a day of robots at work or from a self-driving car. That is still short of what he needs to analyse the 1,000 hours of video that come in from the company’s clients every day.

Analysts estimate that data annotation will contribute up to US$10 billion to India’s economy by the end of the decade. But it is still too small a business to convince economists and policymakers that it will give India a meaningful edge to catch up in the AI race.

At Objectways, the new hires seem content for now being the humans who help with a dutiful but vital part of the process.

Hari Prasad, 25, said that when he graduated with an engineering degree in 2025, he did not imagine his work would include something resembling science fiction.

“If someone had told me that 10 years down the road, a robot would be bringing you coffee, I wouldn’t have believed them,” he said.

But his job today is to help make sure that actually happens. “We need a man to train the robot,” he said with a smile. NYTIMES