AI Will Generate More Job Opportunities In India: N Chandrasekaran

Amid ongoing debate around the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the job market, Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran said that AI will create more jobs in India as it will help people with less skills to perform high-level jobs.

“Actually in a country like us, it (AI) will create jobs because it will empower people with little skill or no skill, will empower them with information skill so that they can perform a higher level of jobs,” Chandrasekaran said during a panel discussion at the B20 Summit India 2023.

B20 or Business 20 is one of the engagement groups of G20. It is a dialogue forum for the global business community.

Chandrasekaran said that the impact of AI will be different across markets and societal segments, news agency PTI reported.

“We talk about a country like India, we say that hundreds of millions of people have to have access… Additional 250 to 300 million people are coming into the market. They have access to information, they have access to goods and services in their own way, they start consuming, it just multiplies the whole GDP to a different level and then their per capita income goes up and we will see the benefit for a very, very long time,” he was quoted as saying.

Chandrasekaran also highlighted the need for establishing adequate AI infrastructure. He said a nation’s capacity to harness the capabilities of generative AI would rely on the availability of such infrastructure.

Earlier, OpenAI founder Sam Altman, during his India visit, said that AI could disrupt the global job market to some extent. He, however, added that the emerging technology will also bring new avenues of employment for the labour market.

Meanwhile, India is also seeing an increase in AI talent pool. The country has emerged as one among the top five fastest-growing AI talent hubs in the world, according to a report by professional social network LinkedIn.

Earlier this year, Zoho cofounder, in a letter co-signed by former NITI Aayog vice-chairman Rajiv Kumar and iSPIRIT Foundation cofounder Sharad Sharma, asked India’s policymakers to regulate AI as it could put millions of jobs at risk.

Meanwhile, Indians seem to have wholeheartedly adopted AI as the number of people in the country who added AI skills to their profiles rose 14 times as of June 2023 compared to January 2016, as per a report. The company was fourth in the world in terms of fastest-growing AI talent pool.

India has seen a surge in use of AI since the introduction of ChatGPT. Indian startups have embraced AI and have been constructing innovative products utilising OpenAI’s APIs for different segments such as edtech, fintech, SaaS, and various other domains.