David Richards MBE writes from the Great North trade mission to India with one question: what happens to a country that sells the world its working hours when the price of getting work done is increasingly set by machines? Cheap labour can delay automation inside India, where a Blinkit rider's base rate is a fraction of Deliveroo's negotiated British floor and replacing the rider is hard to justify. It cannot stop overseas customers automating the work they once sent to Bengaluru. India's technology industry grew about 6% last year and its headcount about 3%; nobody needs to be sacked for that to bite, because the jobs simply fail to turn up. The issue separates the two decisions, weighs the World Bank's counter-evidence, follows the cost to Indian households and a gig-worker levy that has not yet begun, and turns to Britain: an ageing country that needs machines to do more of the work, and the Sheffield pilot where Starship's robots delivered for Uber Eats for five months before the company paused the service for review. Then the same question from the supplier's side: Anthropic's investors discussing $1.5 trillion rather than $2 trillion after quarterly growth slowed to 45%, and the Accenture memo that puts Claude usage beyond $29 a month on a project code. When a task becomes cheaper, who keeps the saving? Plus the Signal Tech & AI Layoff Tracker: Netflix about 1,000, TomTom about 200, Ubisoft up to 122, One Zero 25, and the running estimate at about 137,100.

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KeywordsAI, artificial intelligence, India, Blinkit, gig economy, quick commerce, future of work, automation, delivery robots, Starship, Sheffield, Anthropic, Anthropic IPO, Accenture, Claude, tokens, enterprise AI, labour arbitrage, outsourcing, Nasscom, development economics, World Bank, IMF, demographics, Great North trade mission, Yorkshire, tech layoffs, Netflix layoffs, layoff tracker, David Richards, The Sunday Signal