AI will empower people to perform higher-level jobs in India: N Chandrasekaran

Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran on Friday said artificial intelligence (AI) will create jobs in India because it will empower people with little or no skills to perform higher-level jobs.

"A nurse will be able to take away the workload of a doctor," Chandrasekaran says at the B20 Summit India 2023.

"The world is already moving from predictive AI to generative AI. However, there are two worries – people worry about privacy and jobs," says Chandrasekaran.

India has made a big breakthrough in the privacy space, according to Chandrasekaran. "India has taken a techno-legal approach. On the one hand, we have got the regulations for data privacy and data protection. On the other hand, we have created DEPA (Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture). With both working together, we are able to very safely secure with consent any transaction on sharing of data at an aggregate level with complete security protecting privacy," he says.

"Digital transformation has been a theme around the world for at least a decade. The digital transition is now becoming a night job. The day job has to be AI transformation," says the Tata Sons chairman.

If one looks at the impact that digital transformation has made in India, it is truly remarkable, says Chandrasekaran. "In India, we fundamentally have two problems, which are true for the Global South countries. An estimated 300 million people lack access to services like healthcare and education," he says.

India has a lot of people looking for jobs. There are 10-12 million people coming into the workforce every year and 100 million people coming to the workforce this decade. "You have to solve both problems. This cannot be solved by going around and creating hard infrastructure. You need a lot of money and more importantly, you need a lot of time. We don’t have the time to do it. The only way to solve this is by adopting technology at a pace and scale that has never been done before," the Tata Sons chairman says.

In the last 10 years, India has put in digital infrastructure which is so unique that it can deliver public services at a remarkable scale and with ease, he says.

"We loosely call it the India stack. First, we have digital identification of everyone. Second, we have a payment system which has completely transformed the way we live. Not a single day goes where we don't look for a couple of OTPs (one-time passwords)," says Chandrasekaran. "None of us carry cash. When we go for morning runs and want to have coconut water from a street vendor. He doesn't have time to accept money. He says 'Sir PhonePe karnge, GooglePay karenge'."

Chandrasekaran says Covid-19 vaccinations could not have been done without this infrastructure. "We have been able to create a secure infrastructure where consent is given on the fly digitally. This digital infrastructure enables us to do big things at scale," he says.