Artificial intelligence won’t steal jobs, it will dissect them, says Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, as he outlines the future of work with five predictions for the AI era. “Every job today is a bundle of tasks,” Chandok said. “AI will unbundle those tasks, and when that happens, we will need to bundle ourselves much better.”
AI Teammate
Speaking at the Microsoft AI Tour on Thursday, Chandok stated that how AI will push businesses and individuals to reinvent themselves continuously. Among his predictions, he highlighted the rise of AI as digital colleagues. AI, he said, will evolve from being a “tool on your phone” to becoming a “true teammate”—autonomous agents that can perceive, reason, and act with human permission but without constant involvement. These AI co-workers, he emphasised, will amplify human capability rather than replace it.
Chandok highlighted that the race will no longer be about choosing a cloud platform but an AI model. “The first dollar of every business used to go into servers and databases. Now it goes into models and API calls. Whoever wins the developer’s first API call will build the next hyperscaler,” he said.
From inefficiency to outcome
Chandok also highlighted the transition from an “inefficiency economy” to an “outcome economy,” where value is measured not in hours billed but in results delivered. “AI will end the charade of billing by hours,” he said, noting that industries built on time-based models—such as law—will need to reinvent themselves.
Chandok also predicted that every business will eventually need to build its own AI factory. As models grow more intelligent, he argued, companies must infuse their proprietary knowledge and context to differentiate themselves and stay competitive.
Addressing concerns about AI-driven job loss, Chandok contended that the true threat is not automation but stagnation. “We will be the last generation to have stable long-term careers,” he said, urging that learning become a “guerrilla warfare against irrelevance”.
As part of its India AI Tour, Microsoft announced a $17.5 billion investment in India over the next three years to accelerate the country’s cloud and AI infrastructure, strengthen sovereign digital capabilities, and scale skilling programmes. The commitment—the company’s largest in Asia—comes on top of the $3 billion investment announced in January, which Microsoft said it expects to fully deploy by the end of 2026.
