Nandan Nilekani said India will lead in AI diffusion at scale. He believes small businesses will get new jobs as they use AI to grow. “The business transformation is just not about coding,” he said. Nilekani added that AI will also help improve literacy and numeracy for many Indians soon.
While he did not predict any timeline for this to happen, he said Indian entrepreneurs and small businesses will benefit from access to markets, capital, knowledge, agents to make their lives easier, and become engines of job creation.
Nilekani further said that coding as an activity will become much more productive and new jobs will also come in understanding client requirements.
“The business transformation is just not about coding. In any technology, the technology is only 30%, 70% is governance, change management, transformation, guardrails, how do you make sure that AI bots do not hallucinate, and agents do not go rogue. New jobs will be in understanding the client requirement, in collaborating, in getting people to work together,” said Nilekani.
On the question of tussle of supremacy between US and China over AI, and India’s strategic reliance on both countries to gain access to the technology, he said that AI is not the chokepoint and no single person or entity can own or control it as there will be many players in the sector.
“Everybody is saying that AI is a general purpose technology, like fire, printing, Industrial revolution etc. The thing about general purpose technology is nobody can own or control it. You don’t think the whole world’s electricity is being supplied by one company, you don’t think the world’s books are printed by one printer and so on. AI is going to have a huge number of players, producers, and every week a new model is being announced. You cannot bottle this technology. It is going to become the environment,” said the Infosys Chairman.
“In that part of AI, diffusing and making it work for people at scale, India will be the leader. Because we have the experience in implementing sophisticated technology at scale for the last several years,” he said.
Nandan Nilekani also said that AI is important for improving India’s education sector.
“That’s why I am bullish on AI diffusion and AI application. With AI, we can make a big dent in literacy and numeracy for millions of Indians. Speaking language to the computer will allow people to get the latest access to the information, whether it is agriculture or anything else. We will have agents making life simple for small businesses so they can do more things,” he said.