In The Driver within the Driverless Automobile, I warned of a coming storm: A jobless future pushed by automation and Synthetic Intelligence (AI). That future is not on the horizon — it has begun. However in contrast to within the West, the place total white-collar industries are already being restructured by AI, India has a bit extra time. Not as a result of it’s extra insulated, however as a result of a lot of its infrastructure nonetheless must be constructed — good cities, trendy digital methods, and scalable platforms for a billion-plus folks.
That respiration room is a present. However treating it as a licence for complacency can be a pricey mistake.
Let’s be clear: The foundational work completed by India’s IT providers business — code upkeep, software program patching, integration testing, report technology, and course of documentation — is squarely within the crosshairs of the following wave of AI. That wave is now forming.
At a current Google occasion, DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis laid out what’s coming. He warned that inside a decade, we could attain synthetic normal intelligence — the holy grail of AI, the place machines exhibit human-level cognition. However the disruption gained’t wait that lengthy. It’s already underway within the type of agentic AI — software program methods that don’t simply reply questions, however break down issues, purpose via them, and take motion. These methods have gotten able to dealing with advanced workflows with minimal human oversight. That’s a well mannered means of claiming: They will already do the sort of work that a lot of India’s IT sector is determined by.
Google’s new Agentspace platform, rolling out this 12 months, integrates instruments like Gemini with enterprise knowledge and supplies company-branded brokers that may search, determine, summarise, and execute — on command. Instruments like NotebookLM can immediately synthesise huge troves of paperwork, emails, or manuals and floor insights that groups would take weeks to extract. These aren’t passive chatbots. They’re totally operational digital staff — dependable, tireless, and enhancing by the day.
Already, instruments like GitHub Copilot are writing production-grade code. Salesforce’s Einstein AI is autonomously dealing with buyer help and gross sales optimisation duties. Inside just a few years, applied sciences like these will mature to the purpose the place they will exchange a lot of the repetitive, back-end work completed by a whole lot of hundreds of execs in IT.
The DeepMind CEO acknowledged that present AI fashions nonetheless undergo from what he calls “compounding error” — a 1% error fee multiplied over hundreds of steps renders outcomes practically random. Video games like Go or chess, with mounted guidelines, permit algorithms to plan and purpose reliably. The actual world, with its ambiguity and complexity, doesn’t. That hole presents a short window of alternative.
India ought to be utilizing this time to organize.
The IT sector emerged not by constructing transformative applied sciences, however by filling the world’s want for outsourced back-office work — digitising insurance coverage kinds, fixing Y2K bugs, sustaining legacy code. However these enterprise fashions gained’t survive the AI transition.
The important thing query now’s whether or not the nation will stay a shopper of foreign-built AI methods — or emerge as a developer and exporter of its personal.
This disruption presents large alternative. India has one of many world’s youngest and most tech-savvy populations, broad English proficiency, and a protracted historical past of leapfrogging conventional improvement pathways. It has already demonstrated what’s attainable with Aadhaar, UPI, and ONDC — constructing platforms at inhabitants scale that clear up actual issues. However this subsequent leap requires a mindset shift.
Agentic AI will want new interfaces, governance constructions, fine-tuning instruments, and orchestration platforms. It would want moral frameworks, transparency layers, and sector-specific customisation. These are all areas the place India can lead.
Sensible cities, for instance, could possibly be designed from the bottom up with autonomous brokers managing visitors, power utilization, and public providers in actual time. The very AI that threatens to out of date legacy IT jobs might drive a wave of hyper-efficient, AI-first city improvement.
IT must pivot from outsourcing and providers to mental property creation, creating AI co-pilots for well being care, development, legislation enforcement, and agriculture, and investing in open-source fashions, multimodal agent platforms, and domain-specific AI stacks.
Startups that prepare AI on India’s tax codes, regional languages, SME provide chains, and labour markets can outperform western opponents in native contexts.
The federal government can use its digital infrastructure as a testbed for next-gen AI methods: Predictive illness surveillance, AI-based procurement, real-time coverage simulations, and automatic dispute decision.
The previous methods gained’t work. Engineering graduates can not coast on routine Java or testing jobs. Curricula want a ground-up redesign targeted on immediate engineering, cognitive architectures, mannequin tuning, and moral AI. College students should prepare in real-world labs, not simply on Zoom calls with distant groups.
India would profit from launching a nationwide initiative — akin to its semiconductor or house programmes — devoted to constructing home functionality in agentic AI. Which means public-private partnerships, indigenous basis fashions, and big upskilling of the present workforce. A five-year crash programme to organize the following 10 million information staff for a radically completely different tech business.
If this transition is managed correctly, India might leapfrog into world management in utilized AI — simply because it did with fintech and telecom. But when it’s mismanaged, the consequence could possibly be a hollowing out of the very business that lifted tens of millions into the center class.
That is the calm earlier than the storm — and the second to organize.
Vivek Wadhwa is CEO, Vionix Biosciences. The views expressed are private
