India should focus on becoming a global leader in applied artificial intelligence rather than competing in the capital-intensive race to build AI infrastructure, Infosys co-founder and chairman, Nandan Nilekani said on Thursday, adding that the country’s strength lies in deploying AI at population scale through its digital public infrastructure (DPI).
Speaking at the NCAER India Policy Forum 2026 in the Capital, Nilekani said that while global technology companies were investing billions of dollars in data centres, chips and computing power to build larger AI models, India’s opportunity was to make AI work for millions of people through practical applications.
Describing AI as a general-purpose technology comparable to electricity or railways, Nilekani said India could replicate the success of its DPI stack by making AI accessible and inclusive. A key priority, he said, should be expanding voice-based AI across Indian languages, regional dialects and colloquial speech patterns such as Hinglish to bring more people into the digital economy.
“Making AI inclusive by enabling people to speak in their mother tongue or their native language via voice interaction will dramatically expand access to technology. That alone can lead to significant value and productivity benefits,” he said.
Beyond language, Nilekani said India should prioritise AI applications in sectors such as agriculture and healthcare, where the technology can improve productivity and expand access to services. While India may not be a major player in the infrastructure layer of the AI value chain, it could emerge as one of its biggest beneficiaries as value increasingly shifts to applications built on top of foundational models, he said. He cited the latest World Development Report by World Bank, which states that AI presents a significant opportunity for developing economies.
Nilekani also said that AI could fundamentally reshape white-collar employment, with large companies likely to face greater job displacement because highly structured tasks are easier to automate. “Large companies will probably be net job losers in the coming years,” he said, adding that India needed to rethink how employment would be created in the AI era.
Instead of relying on a handful of large employers, he said future job creation would increasingly come from millions of small businesses and startups. India has grown from fewer than 10,000 startup founders a decade ago to around 150,000 startups today, spanning sectors from deep technology and space to consumer businesses. Maintaining that pace, he said, could take the country to more than one million startups by 2035.
To support that transition, Nilekani called for easier access to credit, markets and AI tools for entrepreneurs. He highlighted initiatives such as the RBI-backed Account Aggregator framework, which enables businesses to use their digital footprint to access credit, and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which allows smaller firms to reach customers through an open digital network.
He also said that India’s social security architecture must evolve alongside a more mobile workforce. As AI accelerates job switching and the gig economy expands, benefits such as pensions, healthcare, insurance and unemployment support should become portable, allowing workers to carry them across employers rather than remain tied to a single job.