Nasscom and Indeed today announced the release of their annual Future of Work report 2025 titled ‘Work Reimagined: The Rise of Human – AI Collaboration’. The report maps how organizations are embedding AI into day-to-day work, and what it means for employers and job seekers as work shifts from execution to outcomes.
Nearly all HR leaders (97%) anticipate that by 2027, the nature of work will be shaped by humans working alongside AI rather than engaging with it only intermittently. This signals a shift from AI being a supplementary tool to becoming an integral part of everyday roles, workflows, and decision-making processes.
AI is already re-shaping ‘the job,’ not just creating new ones
The report finds that 20-40% of work across technology organizations is already being done through AI across functions. 45% of the respondents highlighted that over 40% of the software development is done by AI, followed by 39% and 37% in intelligent automation and BPM, respectively. At the same time, the report also underscores that AI is not independent; more than half of respondents highlighted incomplete and low-quality outputs, reinforcing the need for human oversight to remain critical.
This emerging model of Humans + AI working together is reported as the next phase of transformation, where success depends on how effectively AI will augment human capabilities, empower employees, and align with organizational purpose. The report highlights that the most effective human–AI partnerships are emerging across higher-order activities such as scope definition, system architecture, and data model design. At the same time, more routine and repeatable tasks, including boilerplate code generation and unit test creation, are expected to be increasingly automated by AI over the next two to three years.
Speaking on the findings, Ketaki Karnik, Head of Research, Nasscom, said, “AI is no longer a future consideration for the technology industry and is already shaping how work gets done. The real opportunity now lies in preparing people to work effectively alongside AI. As AI adoption deepens, skilling and capability building will be central to ensuring that talent continues to move up the value chain and delivers meaningful outcomes for businesses.”
“What’s changing isn’t the number of jobs, it’s what those jobs expect from people,” said Sashi Kumar, Managing Director, Indeed India. “We’re seeing roles evolve internally long before hiring signals catch up. Through this report, the aim is to provide practical and actionable guidance to help enterprises and job seekers create a human-plus-AI ecosystem that is productive, inclusive, and future-ready.”
Hiring shifts toward skill-based hiring
As AI changes tasks inside roles, the report notes that hiring is moving from headcount and credential-led selection to capability-driven evaluation, emphasizing proof of work through outcomes and impact.
The report highlights that 85% of hiring managers see an increase in skills-based hiring, along with 98% highlighting the need for hybrid and multidisciplinary skills. For entry-level talent, organizations expect job-ready candidates, with assessments shifting toward live projects, hackathons, case-based questions, portfolios and a greater focus on measurable outcomes. For mid- and senior-level hiring, evaluation focuses on end-to-end ownership, decision-making under ambiguity, and multidisciplinary skill sets, with an increased emphasis on past projects and their impact.
AI agent adoption and impact on job marketplace
The report also indicates rapid momentum behind Agentic AI, where over 95% of respondents highlighted that they are using or planning to use AI agents. Among which, more than 65% feel that AI agents are better than humans owing to their ability to process high volumes of data and better quality of work. For jobseekers, this indicates a transformation with an uneven distribution of pressure.
To stay relevant in a Human + AI workplace, the report emphasizes that individuals should build capability, adaptability, and continuous learning. This includes experience with using AI tools (prompting, critical review of output, combining AI speed with human judgment), moving up the value chain (e.g., developers from coding to architecture thinking), building multidisciplinary skills (tech + domain + professional skills), and focusing on outcomes over credentials by creating repositories of work samples showing measurable impact.
Employers in this context cite concrete barriers to AI implementation, led by security and privacy risks (77%), integration with legacy systems (61%), ethical/governance issues (59%), and resistance to change (58%). Workforce readiness is a parallel focus area for the HRs with ~40% highlighting lack of preparedness on skills required in the AI age even as many organizations report growing skilling efforts.
Contemporary Vs. The Actionable Future
Organizations have already started taking measures to address these challenges. Every seven in ten HR leaders are focusing on upskilling, more than half focusing on modernizing systems. With respect to AI adoption, 79% prioritize internal reskilling as a dominant strategy. Job redesigning is also becoming increasingly critical, shifting humans toward judgment, creativity, and accountability, while AI handles scale and speed. Here, HR leaders are playing a central role with 83% already working towards redesigning work and adding AI-specific roles.
Moreover, work models and organizational structures are also evolving. Currently, more than 55% of organizations report changes in organizational structures driven by AI adoption and productivity gains, where 32% said it’s too early to comment. Hybrid work is now the dominant model with 80% of organizations following a hybrid approach and most employees working from office three or more days a week. In the past year, 88% of HRs have also pushed towards working from office alongside a ‘70-20-10’ approach (70% hybrid, 20% in-office for critical roles, 10% remote exceptions) to enable collaboration and learning.
The report observes that while organizations recognize emerging concerns around trust, output quality and accountability in AI-enabled work, people policies and hiring frameworks are still catching up with the pace of adoption. Rather than signaling widespread job displacement, the report highlights a more immediate transition challenge: roles are evolving faster than they are being articulated or formalized. It underscores the need for clearer role definitions, more transparent hiring signals, and closer alignment between how work is transforming within organizations and how those roles are communicated to the market.