In a growing list of tech moguls warning about the rampant inclusion of AI in most sectors to replace human talent, tech billionaire and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has stepped in, warning India’s IT and BPO sectors with a stark prediction that India’s IT services and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors could “almost completely disappear” within the next five years, driven by rapid advances in AI.
Ahead of the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Khosla, who is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, spoke to Hindustan Times, warning that AI will soon outperform humans in most expertise-based tasks, fundamentally disrupting traditional outsourcing models. “IT and BPO services will disappear, almost certainly within the next five years,” Khosla stated. “In the next five years, AI will be better than most humans at most things. There’s very little where humans will be substantially better,” he added.
Khosla further elaborated that AI agents will take over roles in accounting, medicine (including oncology and therapy), chip design, architecture, sales, and more. “AI workers will be able to do accounting. They’ll do accounting better than accountants. An AI worker can be a physician, a doctor, an oncologist, a mental health therapist, a physical therapist,” he said.
“By the time somebody who’s 22 or 25 today is in their 40s, there will be a lot fewer jobs,” said Khosla, adding that physical robotic labour would follow intellectual automation by about five years.
Khosla looks forward to India’s opportunity in AI exports
Despite the disruption, Khosla urged that India’s 250 million young people should pivot toward exporting AI-based products and services globally rather than relying on traditional job creation or education for jobs that AI will outperform.
“India could become the largest exporter of AI based goods and services to the rest of the world, not IT services,” he advised. He highlighted AI’s potential to democratise access, stating that “AI can make a doctor available to every Indian for almost no cost. AI can make a tutor available to every Indian child and adult for almost no cost. AI can make a lawyer available to every Indian so they can have their legal rights asserted.”
Khosla stressed the need for India to develop sovereign AI models to avoid dependency on US or Chinese dominance, warning of geopolitical risks and national security implications. He also criticised restrictive US immigration policies under Trump, noting that innovation relies heavily on global talent.
AI to have broader economic and social implications
Khosla envisioned a deflationary future with robotic labour at $2-3 per hour, cheaper services, reduced inflation, and near-free access to education, healthcare, and entertainment by 2030-2035. “The question is, what impact does it have for the economy? The biggest impact will be on jobs. But things will also be so much easier to do and so much cheaper to do, you know, robotic labor will cost two or $3 an hour, not $20 an hour. So my bet is you will see reduced inflation and then a huge deflationary economy by 2035 globally,” said Khosla.
However, he cautioned about a potential decade of social disruption from 2030 onward, with large-scale job losses requiring government-led redistribution to prevent backlash.