Ask a Tier-1 BPO agent in Chennai whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take her job, and the honest answer is: which aspect of it? Password resets are already handled by a voice bot, along with generic user related information such as say account balance, or registering for a doctor’s appointment. However, the caller with three problems and a short temper still reaches her.

Her job hasn’t vanished, and it hasn’t stayed the same either. That in-between state is the argument of a new white paper from IIT Madras’s Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI), How AI Is Reconfiguring Work in India.

“Most jobs are made of tasks and only some can be done by AI. The effect depends on the tasks, the industry, the rules and what AI costs to use.…