Chennai: Artificial Intelligence is redesigning roles across sectors, but it is not triggering a jobs collapse. The real story is workforce transition, not displacement, says Ankit Bose, Head of AI at NASSCOM. The AI Impact Summit underscored a shared commitment to human-centric AI and a clear intent for collaboration among countries.
“There may be short-term friction as roles evolve, but in the long run India has a significant opportunity,” Bose told Financial Chronicle. AI is automating repetitive tasks while augmenting human decision-making across IT services, BPOs, KPOs and beyond. India’s large, scalable and reskillable workforce positions it well to lead AI deployment globally.
Globally, AI development is moving faster than anticipated. Over the past two to three years, advances in foundation models, infrastructure and applications have accelerated sharply. Countries are investing heavily in GPUs, specialised chips and data centres. Enterprises have moved from pilot projects to production-scale deployments, increasingly measuring productivity gains and return on investment.
Despite trillions of dollars flowing into AI and frontier technologies, Bose does not foresee a dot-com-style bust. AI infrastructure is capital-intensive, with heavy upfront investments in compute capacity and data centres. However, returns are expected to emerge in a staggered manner as adoption deepens across industries.
On where India stands, Bose draws a clear distinction. The US and China are focused on frontier models and massive compute power, while Europe leads in regulation and governance. India’s strength lies in a use-case-driven, frugal and inclusive approach, particularly relevant for the Global South.
Rather than building trillion-parameter models, India is developing smaller, focused systems trained on Indic languages and cultural contexts. Multilingual AI, along with population-scale applications in agriculture, healthcare and education, is a priority. “The opportunity for India is not in replicating frontier models built elsewhere, but in building inclusive, scalable, human-centric AI systems aligned with national priorities,” he says.
However, challenges remain. High-quality multilingual datasets are still being built. Compute capacity is limited, with India operating around 30,000 GPUs compared to far higher numbers in advanced economies. Expanding infrastructure is critical. Talent readiness is another focus area, particularly ensuring non-STEM professionals can effectively use AI tools.
A 2024 study showed demand for around 600,000 AI and ML engineers in India against a supply of 450,000, though that gap is narrowing rapidly due to aggressive skilling efforts.
As data centres scale up, sustainability will be crucial, with renewable energy and efficiency improvements key to managing rising power demand. AI is transforming workflows across sectors — and India’s challenge is to harness that transformation responsibly and at scale.
The AI Impact Summit underscored a shared commitment to human-centric AI. There is clear intent for collaboration, and follow-up engagements are expected.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
