Nandan Nilekani pushed back hard on the idea that artificial intelligence will hollow out employment. At the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi on Tuesday, he said the notion that AI will replace people is "hogwash." He sees AI lifting small businesses and stoking demand for new skills. Yes, more programming can now be handled by machines and coding is "getting automated," but in his view that is only a sliver of what large services projects require.
He argued that headlines about AI cutting jobs amount to "all disaster marketing to suit the interests of large capital." For companies modernizing their operations, he said the need for partners like Infosys is growing, because using AI well means rethinking how a business works end to end.
Nilekani said roles will emerge to guide how AI is rolled out and to manage its risks, with work focused on making systems safe and reliable. "Business transformation is not just about coding," he said. "Seventy percent is governance, change management, transformation, guardrails. How do you make sure AI bots don't hallucinate? How do you make sure agents don't go rogue?" He added that new jobs will be "in understanding client requirements, in collaborating, in getting people to work together."
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India's big outsourcing firms, including Infosys, long relied on vast pools of engineering grads writing software for global clients. Code-writing features in AI systems offered by firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC are already overturning that setup. Nilekani, one of Infosys' seven co-founders, acknowledged the shift, noting coding is "getting automated," but said the technology piece is only a small part of a services engagement. He expects more demand, not less: "We are going to see only more work coming our way." Companies, he added, will have to "get their act together," "transform themselves, reskill their workers, build new capabilities."
Not everyone is as upbeat. International Monetary Fund Director Kristalina Georgieva has warned AI is a "slow-moving tsunami" for labor markets. Investors are still warming up too.
Over the past two years, Infosys has seen its stock slip roughly 45%, despite a 3.2% rise on Tuesday. Rival Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. advanced 6.2%.
If Nilekani is right, AI trims routine coding while expanding higher-value work around governance, change management and keeping systems trustworthy. For everyday investors, that shifts attention from how many lines of code AI can write to which firms can reimagine client operations and retrain their people quickly. That is where budgets, and eventually earnings, tend to migrate.
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