As a nation with the largest population under 35 years, India is blessed with a demographic dividend that could be the trump card in the ongoing battle for competitiveness in the world. However, to make it work in our favour, appropriate skilling of the workforce as per the emerging trends and demand would be the key.
Skill development has progressed over the centuries from craftsmanship to industrial competence to digital literacy. Nowadays, AI is not only automating work but it is also redefining skills. The AI era has unveiled the significance of a new set of capabilities centered around AI. In this context, it is important to distinguish AI literacy from AI fluency and AI agency. The ability to work with GenAI tools is known as AI literacy whereas AI fluency refers to the ability to collaborate, supervise and co-create with intelligent systems.
AI agency is a further evolved set of skill sets that enables the individuals to design and direct autonomous AI systems. It is interesting to note that 92% of computer users in India are already engaging with AI tools as per Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2025. The focus now has to shift from AI literacy to AI fluency – that would act as the catalyst for transforming demographic dividend to AI dividend.
The need of the times for skilling therefore has to move away from training people for purely performing tasks to preparing them to learn to work with AI, supervise, train and orchestrate AI systems. Historically, knowledge recall and retrieval has carried a premium for humans. With knowledge retrieval being automated, creativity through exploration, problem definition and analysis, systems thinking and reasoning have become the critical skills for success in life.
India’s National Education Policy (NEP 2020) has elucidated the framework for AI training, however, it still focuses on AI tools and not on critical thinking – the foundation for AI fluency. College degrees by themselves would no longer be relevant, skills and particularly the ability to work with AI would be the currency for jobs. We are already seeing this trend in some companies- Google, SpaceX, Open AI hire primarily for skills.
Just as India had successfully initiated and implemented IT induction and education in universities and schools in the early 2000s, the fruits of which we are still enjoying, we need a plan to develop skilled thinking. With internet and computing access having significantly enhanced in the last two decades, an inclusive strategy for AI training covering rural youth should also be part of the plan. This would mean developing training in vernacular languages, building LLMs (large language models) and SLMs (small language models) for domain specific content and designing mobile learning labs to democratise AI fluency.
Innovative pedagogy should be considered for nurturing AI fluency in rural schools. AI storytelling helps explain AI concepts such as data bias and pattern recognition. Students in Chhatisgarh are learning AI through Panchatantra stories that enable them to appreciate the decision making process. The example of Community AI Labs being set up in Karnataka villages by Infosys Foundation highlights the possibility of such models that could be shared by several schools in the region.
While it is becoming a reality that routine and repetitive tasks would be replaced with autonomous tools and would result in the loss of jobs, India has a huge opportunity in becoming the AI workforce capital of the world. This can only happen if skilling is planned suitably in order to prepare the AI ready workforce. Time has come for us to focus our energies on the potential opportunity with AI rather than being concerned about the threat of AI with job displacement. We need to build a strategy and momentum around the immense potential of redefining human value.
The writer is chairperson, GTT Foundation