From 2015 to 2022, India's IT services exports and global robot vacuum sales rose together at a correlation of 0.97, suggesting that outsourced software and autonomous floor cleaning are moving in perfect harmony toward a world that manages itself while humans do something else entirely. What that something else is, the data does not specify. It is possibly content creation. It is almost certainly not cleaning.
India's IT services exports grew from roughly $98 billion in 2015 to over $150 billion by 2022, driven by global demand for software development, business process outsourcing, and cloud services, with companies like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro expanding globally. Robot vacuum sales grew from a few million units annually in 2015 to over 15 million globally by 2022, driven by falling prices, improved technology, and pandemic-driven home investment. Both trends reflect rising global investment in automation — one in white-collar digital work, one in domestic physical tasks — across the same technology adoption curve.
Automation at the enterprise level and automation at the household level both grew in the same decade for the same underlying reason: the price of capability fell while the value of human time rose. The correlation is not spurious so much as it is convergent.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “Robot vacuums sold” vs “India IT services exports” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
