Saurabh Mukherjea, the founder and chief investment officer of Marcellus Investment Managers, has sparked a discussion on social media after he recently predicted the “death of salaried employment”. Speaking on the podcast, “Beyond the Paycheck: India’s Entrepreneurial Rebirth”, he said that India is undergoing a seismic shift from traditional white-collar jobs to a culture of entrepreneurship.
“I think the defining flavour of this decade will be effectively the death of salaried employment, the gradual demise of salary employment as a worthwhile avenue for educated, determined, hardworking people, and the rise of entrepreneurship. Economic opportunity is plentiful in India,” said Mukherjea.
He then gave the example of “Just looking like a wow” fame Jasmeen Kaur, adding that one can build their brand on their own without VC funding, family lineage or degrees.
This shift, he thinks, is pushed by the JAM Trinity (Jandhan, Aadhaar, and Mobile), which has given people access to banking, identification and information.
“India was only seeing roughly 60,000 new companies being created, but if you look at the 2024 data, India created 1.8 lakh new companies,” he said.
One major driver of this shift, he argued, is the impact of AI on global employment. “Employment is gradually going to die away in India… It’s evident from looking at the impact of AI and automation… There are increasingly fewer jobs available….” He then gave an example of Google about how a third of its coding is done by AI.
Mukherjea also pointed out how AI is beginning to replace middle management and supervisory roles, which were once thought to be indispensable.
“Much of what was supposed to be done by white-collar workers is now done by AI… The old model where our parents worked for 30 years for one organisation is dying. The job construct that built India’s middle class is no longer sustainable,” he added.
He further said, “We’re a money-obsessed society. We define success by paychecks. That has to change. We should be solving for happiness and impact, not just monthly income. Families like yours and mine must stop preparing kids to be job-seekers. The jobs won’t be there.”