Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder of Infosys, said on Thursday that millions of small businesses, not big corporations, would create jobs in India in the future, claiming that artificial intelligence (AI) would make highly structured companies more susceptible to automation.
Speaking at a National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) event, Nilekani predicted that as AI automates repetitive jobs, big businesses will probably become ‘net job losers,’ while employment would increasingly come from small businesses where employees fill many roles.
In a way, small enterprises will be the ones creating jobs in the future because highly organised large companies will be the most susceptible to job losses. Every task is reduced to a few predetermined duties since they are so well organised. Automating that and eliminating jobs is likewise simple. Therefore, in the upcoming years, large companies would likely lose jobs overall.
In order to support the expansion of small firms, he also advocated for less complicated rules, greater access to markets and credit, and AI tools. According to Nilekani, programmes like the Account Aggregator framework might make formal credit more accessible, while the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) could support small businesses in expanding into new markets.
According to him, these steps might empower millions of entrepreneurs when combined with deregulation and AI-enabled business support.
In the wake of the NEET-UG paper leak issue and subsequent student protests, the Centre last month nominated Nilekani to chair a powerful commission on examination reforms, which makes the remarks significant.
He stated that India should use AI to provide access to knowledge and enhance learning outcomes using voice-based and Indian-language interfaces. Instead of concentrating only on AI infrastructure, he contended that the nation might become the ‘AI use case capital’ of the globe by using the technology in fields like healthcare, education and agriculture.
