High salaries for techies may not last forever, warned Zoho founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu via his social media account on Sunday morning.

Drawing parallels between the salaries of mechanical engineers, civil engineers or even chemists or school teachers and software engineers, he said that techies earning grand digits was “not some birthright.” His cautionary note signalled fears ahead for them, saying, “We cannot take it for granted, and we cannot assume it will last forever.” Sending out a reminder that anyone’s professional track can be “disrupted,” he also added, “The fact that customers pay for our products also cannot be taken for granted.”

Quoting Intel’s co-founder Andre Grove: “Only the paranoid survive,” Vembu said, “The productivity revolution I see coming to software development (LLMs + tooling) could destroy a lot of software jobs. This is sobering but necessary to internalise.”

Zoho chief scientist’s claims about AI-related productivity swallowing employment align with the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) January 2024 reports that suggested nearly 40% of global employment will fall victim to artificial intelligence.

Self-proclaimed ‘AI Whisperer,’ a user named Manvendra Singh, replied to Sridhar Vembu: “Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen’s disruption framework shows how new tech starts in overlooked markets, then scales to topple giants—like digital cameras did to Kodak, which invented them in 1975 but clung to film’s 70% margins, losing 80% of its workforce by 2012.”

He went on to say that AI was subjecting software engineering to a similar pattern as “tools like GitHub Copilot boost productivity by 55% (McKinsey, 2024), threatening routine jobs. Yet, 90,000+ software roles were posted in Jan 2025 (Aura Intelligence), showing resilience. By 2030, AI agents may handle entire codebases (XBSoftware, 2024), creating roles for AI integrators.”

Bill Gates on why AI taking over jobs may be a good thing

Meanwhile, Bill Gates recently mapped out a vision that sought to reevaluate traditional work structures. While at Express Adda, an event organised by The Indian Express, he said, “As you move away from human-driven action being a necessity, you get a lot more leisure time, and it becomes almost a philosophical question—a matter of purpose,” he said.

He added, “People who have grown up in a world of scarcity will have to rethink things. Today, we can choose whether a machine or a human performs a task. It’s difficult to reprogramme you brain to this shift.”