Artificial Intelligence and Employment Prospects: A Sentiment and Emotion Analysis in the Indian Context

ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought a significant transformation in the labor market, sparking mixed sentiments among individuals regarding their employment prospects. To determine a broader emotional response, individual comments posted on 26 YouTube videos discussing the impact of AI on employment within the Indian labor market were scraped and analyzed using pre‐trained VADER and ROBERTA for sentiment analysis; NRCLex for emotion analysis; and topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Findings indicate an increasing negative sentiment among individuals toward AI and employment from 2017 to 2023, with three dominant emotions being anticipation, trust, and fear. Further, the temporal analysis showcases the trend followed by sentiment and emotion from 2017 to 2023. Using LDA, three major focal points of discussion, namely AI Awareness, AI at workplace and AI and future employment, were identified. Based on our results, relevant managerial and policy implications are offered.