What happens if AI takes your job? Hyderabad techies are asking how they will survive

Hyderabad: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) rapidly becomes part of the workplace, a new discussion is emerging among Hyderabad’s tech workforce, not just about whether AI will take jobs, but about how people will survive if it does.

Reddit post sparks debate

The question came into sharp focus on Reddit’s r/hyderabad, where a post asking how people would manage their finances if they lost their jobs because of AI sparked a wide-ranging discussion.

The post was particularly personal.

The user said their home and car EMIs together were above Rs 1 lakh a month and that they had only around two months of emergency savings, which could potentially be stretched to three months. The user also said they were seeing people remain unemployed for 12 to 18 months after layoffs.

The discussion quickly moved beyond conventional advice such as saving money and upgrading skills.

‘I can do Uber or Rapido’, but will that be enough?

One of the first suggestions was to turn to gig work.

When the original poster said they did not even know how to ride a bike and therefore could not consider Uber or Rapido, another user simply responded: “Easy, learn to ride a bike.”

But the suggestion immediately triggered another question: would gig work actually replace a technology professional’s income?

One commenter pointed out that even if someone used a car for Uber or Rapido, the income might not be enough to cover a monthly EMI burden exceeding Rs 1 lakh.

Another user questioned the idea from a different angle: if AI-driven layoffs become widespread, who would still be travelling to offices and generating demand for ride-hailing services?

That led to a bigger concern: the possible second-order impact of AI-led job losses.

‘Who will pay the rent?’

One commenter argued that people were overlooking what could happen to the wider economy if large numbers of relatively well-paid technology workers lost their jobs.

The user gave examples of people planning to survive through rental income or by opening restaurants, and asked who would pay high rents or eat at those restaurants if employment and incomes fell sharply.

Another commenter described this as a potential “cascading effect” across the economy.

The concern is significant for a city like Hyderabad, where the technology and services sectors have become closely connected to housing, restaurants, transport, retail and other urban businesses.

At the same time, Hyderabad is positioning itself as a major AI hub. TCS subsidiary HyperVault recently announced plans to invest up to Rs 70,000 crore in a 1GW AI data-centre campus at Bharat Future City, underscoring the scale of the AI infrastructure boom underway in the city.

‘Upskill before it is too late’

Not everyone in the discussion viewed AI only as a threat.

One Reddit user who said they had built production applications using AI agents argued that AI-driven productivity was advancing rapidly. According to the user, tasks that previously took much longer could increasingly be completed with AI tools.

The commenter described Hyderabad and Bengaluru as potentially vulnerable to these productivity gains and said the future was difficult to predict because, in their view, intelligence itself was increasingly becoming commoditised.

Another user who said their organisation was already reducing staff claimed that work their team previously completed in a day could now be done using AI coding tools at around 70–80 per cent quality.

The conclusion for some participants was straightforward: learn to work with AI before AI changes the nature of the job.

Some are thinking beyond the IT sector

For others, the backup plan is not another technology job at all.

One commenter said they were considering farming or raising sheep as a way of becoming more self-sufficient.

Another user, who said they had already exhausted their savings after dealing with similar financial pressures, said they were now willing to take up any kind of work, including manual, low-paying or blue-collar jobs, until they could clear their EMIs and rebuild savings.

Their longer-term plan was content creation.

The user suggested that people could create content around anything they know or enjoy, from technology and food to books, lifestyle or geopolitics and even document their own struggles and career transitions.