Two Sides & Cents of Nandan Nilekani

Sector6  Feb 20, 2026 The bi-weekly newsletter by AIM that brings the biggest shifts shaping IT, AI, and GCCs. Two Sides & Cents of Nandan Nilekani Nandan Nilekani's AI warning: 90 million jobs at risk, 170 million to be created. Can India truly become the AI use-case capital of the world? By Mohit Pandey The 'CTO of India' returns—both with a warning and an opportunity.  At the Infosys Investor AI Day, Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder of Infosys, delivered a presentation that lingered in the minds of attendees. One of his slides stood out. Citing the World Economic Forum report, he said that around 92 million jobs globally are at risk from AI. At the same time, he clarified that 170 million new roles could emerge. The shift, he argued, will demand "fundamental surgery" inside companies that still run on legacy systems and outdated talent models. Front-end developers, QA testers, IT support specialists, and blockchain developers are among the roles facing the fastest decline. AI systems are already writing code, testing software and managing routine IT operations. According to Nilekani, the real disruption is not theoretical anymore. It is already underway. Yet, he rejected the idea that this creates an opportunity deficit. "There is more opportunity than ever. The real hold-up, he said, is execution. Enterprises are struggling to close the gap between fast-advancing AI capabilities and their own readiness to deploy them.  A large part of the problem is structural. Around 60-70% of IT budgets still go into maintaining legacy systems. Old architectures trap data in silos, slow down experimentation and increase security risks.  In some cases, breach detection in such environments can take more than 200 days. "Accumulated tech debt must be paid now to unlock AI agility," Nilekani said. For him, AI is not a plug-in upgrade. It demands a full-stack overhaul of operations. AI now changes how decisions are made and how work itself is defined. Writing code will no longer be the end goal. Designing systems, supervising models, auditing outputs and integrating AI into business processes will matter more. Two days after his investor address, Nilekani took the stage at the India AI Impact Summit for a conversation with Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic. The discussion shifted from corporate restructuring to national ambition. AIM Network Deep Dive >> But before going to Nilekani and Anthropic's discussion, let's look at how Silicon Valley's biggest AI company just made its most aggressive move yet, not in the US, but in India. OpenAI dominated the India AI Impact Summit 2026, overshadowing Google and Anthropic with massive infrastructure deals and a landmark partnership with the Tata Group. AIM Launches GCC Council in Partnership With LinkedIn India AIM, in partnership with LinkedIn, has launched the AIM Global Capability Centre (GCC) Council—a curated, invite-only leadership forum that brings together senior GCC leaders from India and the broader GCC ecosystem. Click here to find out more. The Use-Case Capital, Still At the summit, Amodei made an audacious claim. If deployed effectively, AI could help India achieve economic growth rates of 20-25%. He acknowledged how absurd that number sounds. India has only briefly touched growth in the mid-20s—and that was after the pandemic, largely due to a low-base effect.  Still, he paints a "very bullish picture" of the possibility of such growth. The core idea was diffusion. Frontier models are improving exponentially in software engineering, mathematics and early biomedical reasoning. But even if model development stopped today, most of the economic upside would remain unrealised because adoption always lags invention. Nilekani agreed. Building foundation models is one challenge. Spreading them across millions of users, institutions, and small businesses is another entirely.  Drawing from India's digital public infrastructure experience, he argued diffusion is both art and science. It requires policy support, institutional trust, regulatory guardrails and careful negotiation with incumbents. This, Nilekani has always believed, is where India has an edge. Through platforms such as digital identity and real-time payments, the country has already demonstrated the ability to scale technology to the population level. For years, Nilekani has said that India should aim to become the "use case capital" of the world.  At the summit, he doubled down. To prevent resentments around job losses and workers, or disappointment if AI fails to deliver the value, the focus, in his view, should be on large-scale, tangible outcomes. Farmers must earn more, children must learn better, and citizens must access healthcare and public services in their own languages.  AI must move beyond elite labs and corporate pilot programmes. To push that vision, Nilekani announced a '100 Diffusion Pathways by 2030' initiative, a coalition that includes EkStep Foundation, United Nations Development Programme, People+ai, Anthropic, Google and the Gates Foundation. The goal is to build playbooks that combine technical design with regulatory and institutional lessons. "Right now in AI, there's a race to the top and a race to the bottom," he said. "And the race to the bottom is faster than the race to the top." India has the scale to be both the leader and the use-case capital of the world. But how it manages the accompanying shift in jobs may ultimately determine whether that ambition succeeds. The GCC Advantage for US Mid-Sized Retailers: A New Playbook for Scaling Analytics & AI in Retail AIM Research, in association with Systems Plus as research partner, has undertaken a comprehensive study to examine how GCCs—particularly in India—can help US mid-sized retailers bridge these gaps. The study finds that modern GCCs have evolved into strategic extensions of the enterprise, supporting core engineering, analytics, AI experimentation, and 24×7 operations. Click here to access the full report. Best Firm for Data Scientists – Showcase your leadership in data science and build a thriving workplace. Apply Now Join AIM Leaders Council – Connect with top data leaders and shape the future of AI. Check Eligibility Our Events – Be part of an exclusive event uniting North America's top data leaders. More Details AIM PeMa Quadrant – Discover the best in AI and data services with AIM's PeMa Quadrant. 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