He also argued that AI could create new employment opportunities by making workers more productive, allowing businesses to expand and hire more people.
Artificial intelligence is unlikely to trigger the job apocalypse that many fear, and workers should focus on acquiring new skills rather than worrying about being replaced by machines (commonly called the ‘AI Jobapocalypse’ fear), AI pioneer Andrew Ng said at the NDTV World Summit. Addressing concerns about the impact of AI on employment, Andrew Ng said the technology was not yet capable enough to eliminate the vast majority of jobs.
But Andrew Ng’s argument suggests that simply learning how to use today’s AI tools may not be enough. “And so if you keep on learning new skills, the jobs will be there. Andrew Ng’s remarks offer a counterpoint to growing fears that rapid advances in generative AI and increasingly capable AI agents could make large numbers of workers redundant. However, he stressed that the ability to adapt to a changing workplace would be critical. Andrew Ng was referring to the recent labour-market data that presented a mixed picture. The findings point to a recovery concentrated in experienced and AI-skilled workers, rather than a broad-based boom in hiring. Andrew Ng acknowledged that preparing workers for an AI-enabled economy remained a major challenge While rejecting the idea of an imminent jobs apocalypse. He argued that education and training programmes needed to anticipate how work would evolve, rather than focus exclusively on the skills currently in demand. The remarks come at a time when educational institutions, technology companies and employers are racing to introduce AI training programmes. Workers will also need to develop skills that remain relevant as the technology evolves and job responsibilities change. These projections cover multiple forces, including technological change, economic shifts and demographic trends; they should not be interpreted as an estimate of jobs created by AI alone. The report also identifies AI, big data and technological literacy among the skills expected to grow in importance, alongside human capabilities such as analytical thinking, resilience and collaboration.
So that’s the challenge ahead of us. US software development job postings rose by nearly 15% between the launch of Claude Code in late February 2025 and June 2026, even as overall job postings fell by 7% over the same period, according to sata released in July by Indeed Hiring Lab . The research found that senior roles accounted for 71% of the increase in software development postings, while 37% of the increase came from jobs mentioning AI in their titles. “So we’re readying them not for the jobs of 2026 or even, heaven forbid, the jobs of 2024, but for the jobs of 2028 and beyond. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that, by 2030, broader labour-market transformations could create 170 million jobs and displace 92 million, resulting in a net gain of 78 million jobs globally.
NDTV World Summit: Track Live Updates “I want to tell you, there will be hope and it’s not nearly as bad as the hype says it will,” the expert told NDTV’s Ai and Tech Editor Aayush Ailawadi, addressing students worried about their future careers and professionals anxious about the changing job market. “A number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse to try to make themselves look more powerful or to gain PR attention,” he said, adding that emerging data suggested AI was creating more jobs than it was destroying. Frankly, I wish AI worked better, but it just doesn’t work that well yet and it’s just not good enough to destroy the vast majority of jobs,” he said. “But the challenge, and there is a big challenge, is people do need new skills to work in this new AI-enabled economy and so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need,” he said.
Andrew Ng cited software engineering as an example of how AI could reshape employment rather than simply eliminate jobs. “And guess what? Because when we make software engineers much more productive, we want to hire a lot more of them, certainly in the United States, the number of software engineer job postings is up.
“Of all the different job sectors, the one that AI has affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code,” he said. He said a similar pattern could emerge in other sectors as AI tools become more widely adopted, although the outcome would vary across occupations.
