Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu warns that AI may transform coding but emphasizes the enduring importance of domain knowledge and practical skills for software professionals in a changing industry.
On 6 September, Zoho founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu said people working in software should start thinking harder about how they remain useful as artificial intelligence takes on more of the work that once defined the profession. Moneycontrol reported that he linked rapid progress in machine reasoning and code generation to a more practical question than whether machines can program at all: how many people companies will still need when far more of the output can be produced by software.
That is not quite the same as saying software teams are about to disappear. Moneycontrol said Vembu still treats programming as a core skill, but argues that AI is more likely to reshape jobs than erase every human role in product development. Earlier, in February, Business Standard quoted him saying AI-driven coding had already delivered “dramatic, real productivity gains”, suggesting that, in his view, the shift is already under way rather than a distant possibility.
In April, he put that argument in career terms. Hindustan Times and India Today both reported him advising engineers: “Be very good domain experts. Programming skills are the foundation … but deep domain knowledge is what customers pay for, along with reliability, security, support and compliance.” Business Today said he presented that as a practical framework for surviving the AI era, not as a rejection of programming itself.
The distinction matters because Vembu’s case is that software development does not begin and end with writing code quickly. Business Today reported him saying that AI can help teams reach a working prototype much faster, but that a finished product “has a lot more to it”. India Today and Hindustan Times similarly said he sees uneven gains across the development cycle, with reliability, security, support and customer experience still demanding work that is not easily compressed into an automated pipeline.
That helps explain why he has also resisted the simpler claim that the software jobs slowdown is mainly an AI story. Fortune India reported in March 2025 that Vembu wrote: “What is ailing the software job market is not AI taking away jobs (not yet anyway).” Instead, he pointed to over-capacity in the industry, arguing that years of venture capital, private equity and IPO money encouraged too much spending, too many overlapping products and a labour market built for a less disciplined era.
In that account, the problem is as much economic as technical. Fortune India said Vembu criticised fear-driven enterprise buying and a pattern in which inefficiency gets passed from one layer of the software stack to another. He also argued that many large companies have accumulated duplicated IT systems and now spend heavily merely to keep them operating. If that diagnosis is right, some of the pain facing software workers comes from an overdue clean-up of bloated technology estates, not simply from better code-generating models.
At the same time, Vembu has offered a more optimistic reading of what widespread AI coding could mean for the sector. Speaking at Zoho Day in February, according to Business Standard, he said code in software-as-a-service may become increasingly commoditised, while more of the real value sits in the “harness around AI”. He also argued that lower software costs could expand demand, because businesses still have many unsolved problems that become worth addressing once the economics improve.
Zoho’s own numbers give that argument some weight. Business Standard said the company has now completed 30 years, serves 1 million paying organisations and supports more than 150 million users globally. The same report said Zoho recorded 32% year-on-year customer growth and 20% revenue growth in 2025. It also said the group is investing beyond software in hardware, chip design, quantum sensing and sodium battery research, part of what Vembu described as a “bits-to-atoms” direction of travel.
Taken together, his remarks over the past 18 months amount to a measured warning rather than a simple prediction of mass replacement. AI, in Vembu’s telling, is already making coders more productive and may take over a larger share of routine software creation. But across comments reported by Moneycontrol, Hindustan Times, India Today and Business Today, his repeated point is that the durable value in software lies elsewhere: understanding a domain, building dependable systems, meeting compliance requirements and improving outcomes for customers. For engineers, the challenge is not whether coding still matters. It is whether coding alone will be enough.
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