If you work in support or operations, 2026 is not an easy year to be in your shoes. AI is reshaping the industry faster than anyone prepared for, salaries haven’t moved meaningfully in years, and a real career path forward feels harder to see than ever.
You’re not imagining it. These are structural problems and not personal failures. And they’re affecting hundreds of thousands of support and operations professionals across India and globally.
Table of Contents
Challenge 1 — AI Anxiety: The Fear of Being Replaced
Nothing is generating more stress in support and ops right now than the uncertainty about AI. Every week brings a new headline: a company automating its call centre, a CEO announcing that AI will replace customer support roles, a round of layoffs tied to automation.
The fear is understandable. The TCS CEO has publicly stated that call centres could become obsolete within a year. Estimates suggest 85% of routine customer support jobs are under serious threat by 2026–27. For professionals who’ve spent years building their careers in this space, that’s a frightening headline to wake up to.
What the Data Actually Says About AI and Support Jobs
The picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest — but it still demands action:
| 80% of customer service organisations are expected to use generative AI by 2026 — Gartner, 2026 |
| AI adopters see 18% higher customer satisfaction and 250% average ROI — IDC / Microsoft via MasterOfCode, 2026 |
| Support agents using AI handled 13.8% more enquiries per hour — Nielsen Norman Group via HatchWorks, 2026 |
The pattern is consistent: companies that implement AI well don’t just fire their support teams they expect their support teams to operate AI-powered systems. That requires a different skill set, not an exit from the profession.
Why Upskilling and Not Panic is the Right Response
Here’s what the data also shows: 70% of support leaders trust AI more than they did in 2024 (AmplifAI, 2026). And 91% of businesses are positive about AI for customer engagement (LivePerson, 2025). Companies aren’t abandoning support they’re transforming it.
The professionals who will thrive are those who learn to build and manage AI-powered support systems, not just use them passively. That transition is learnable. Most of the relevant skills don’t require a technical background.
“AI isn’t replacing support professionals. It’s replacing support professionals who don’t know how to use it.”
Challenge 2 Low Salaries That Don’t Reflect the Value You Deliver
Support and operations is the backbone of every business. No company survives without happy customers. No product succeeds without operational infrastructure holding it together. And yet, support and ops remain among the most systematically underpaid functions in the corporate world.
The Real Numbers: What Support & Operations Professionals Earn in India
The salary reality is sobering:
- Entry-level support and ops roles typically start at Rs. 20,000 or less per month
- Professionals with 5 years of experience often still earn under Rs. 50,000 per month
- Even with 10+ years of experience, many professionals struggle to break the Rs. 1 lakh per month mark
- Meanwhile, peers in sales, marketing, and technology often with the same years of experience earn 50% to 3x more
The gap isn’t a coincidence. It’s a structural feature of how support and ops roles are valued or rather, undervalued in the industry.
Why Support Is Undervalued Despite Being Business Critical
Negative reviews and poor word-of-mouth kill businesses. Customer satisfaction drives retention, and retention drives revenue. Sales cannot scale if existing customers churn. Operations keeps everything running. By every logical measure, support and ops should command competitive compensation.
The reality is that these functions are treated as cost centres rather than value drivers and that framing suppresses pay across the board. Changing that perception, at least for your own career, means repositioning yourself and your skills in markets where support talent is genuinely scarce and commands real rates.
“Someone with 10 years of support and ops experience may still earn less than peers with 5 years of experience in other fields. That’s not a performance problem. It’s a market problem.”
Challenge 3 Increments That Barely Beat Inflation
Even when promotions do come, the actual salary increase rarely changes the picture meaningfully. The average increment in support and ops roles typically runs under 10% and in a high-inflation environment, that’s barely keeping pace with the cost of living, not getting ahead of it.
In some years, there are no increments at all. A professional who joined at Rs. 20,000 five years ago may be earning Rs. 28,000–30,000 today. That’s not a career trajectory-that’s a treadmill.
The compounding effect over a decade is significant. While peers in other functions have doubled or tripled their salaries through performance bonuses, stock options, and market-rate hikes, the support and ops professional is negotiating for a 7% increment in an annual review.
- Average support and ops increment: under 10% annually
- Inflation rate in India (recent years): 5–7%
- Real salary growth after inflation: effectively near zero in many years
- In some companies, increments were zero for extended periods
Challenge 4 No Flexibility: Tied to Cities, Shifts, and Offices
The majority of well-paying support and operations roles are still concentrated in large metros — Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi NCR. If you don’t live in one of these cities, your options narrow sharply. And if you do relocate, a significant portion of the salary bump immediately disappears into rent and commuting costs.
For professionals with family obligations ageing parents, a partner’s career, children in school relocation is often simply not an option. This locks many talented professionals into lower-paying local roles with limited upward mobility.
The Graveyard Shift Trap
Those who do secure MNC roles often face a different trade-off: graveyard shifts to synchronise with US or European client time zones. Working 10pm to 6am is not a minor inconvenience. It has documented effects on physical health, mental wellbeing, sleep quality, and family relationships.
The cruel irony is that these are often the roles that pay marginally better so professionals feel they have to accept the trade-off. You earn slightly more, but at a significant personal cost that doesn’t show up in the salary figure.
- Most quality support roles require in-office presence in Tier 1 cities
- Relocation costs significantly erode salary gains
- MNC roles often require night shifts aligned to US / European time zones
- Night shift work is linked to long-term health risks and reduced quality of life
- Remote work options in support remain limited compared to tech or marketing roles
Challenge 5 Stagnation: Working Hard With Nowhere to Go
Of all the challenges, this one may be the most demoralising. You show up every day. You solve problems. You handle difficult customers with patience. You hit your targets. And yet, nothing changes. The work is the same next month as it was last month. The role looks the same in year five as it did in year one.
Career progression in support and ops is often narrow team lead, then maybe a manager role, and then a ceiling that’s very hard to break through. The paths that exist in sales or marketing specialist roles, industry recognition, high-value consulting simply don’t have equivalents in traditional support career tracks.
The Emotional Cost No One Talks About
Heavy customer facing roles carry an emotional weight that rarely gets acknowledged. Dealing with frustrated customers, escalations, complaints, and difficult conversations day after day is genuinely exhausting not just professionally, but emotionally.
When that emotional labour isn’t matched by growth, recognition, or fair compensation, burnout becomes almost inevitable. And many professionals find themselves trapped they’ve invested years in this field, don’t see an obvious exit, and feel stuck between the discomfort of staying and the uncertainty of leaving.
- Monotonous work with no new skills being developed year over year
- Limited internal mobility team lead is often the only visible next step
- Emotional drain from high-volume customer-facing work with no corresponding reward
- Management pressure from team leads who are themselves underpaid and under stress
- No clear answer to the question: ‘Where does this career go from here?’
“The education system, universities, and even top MBA programmes are not equipping support and ops professionals for the AI-driven changes of 2025. You’re navigating this largely on your own.”
The Bigger Picture: Why This Crisis Is Happening Now
These five challenges aren’t unrelated. They’re symptoms of a single underlying problem: support and operations has been structurally underinvested in for decades, and the arrival of AI has made that underinvestment suddenly and painfully visible.
Companies that didn’t invest in building strong, well-compensated support teams are now scrambling to automate. That automation is threatening the jobs of professionals who weren’t given the tools, training, or career paths to adapt. The education system hasn’t caught up. The MBA programmes aren’t addressing it. And most HR functions are treating it as a cost problem rather than a talent problem.
The result is a large population of skilled, experienced professionals who are genuinely valuable — but who have been told, through pay and promotion decisions, that they aren’t.
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