Infosys Chairman Calls Job Fears ‘Hogwash’ as AI Spurs Business

Infosys Ltd. Chairman Nandan Nilekani, one of India’s most prominent tech founders, shrugged off worries about AI eliminating jobs and said the technology will instead galvanize small businesses and fuel demand for new skills.

While tasks such as coding can increasingly be handled by artificial intelligence, other roles will emerge to manage the technology’s deployment and its risks, Nilekani, 71, said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi on Tuesday. The idea that AI will displace human workers is “hogwash,” he said.

The IT industry veteran is more optimistic about AI’s impact on employment than others, with International Monetary Fund Director Kristalina Georgieva warning that AI is a “slow-moving tsunami” for the labor market. Nilekani, one of Infosys’ seven co-founders, sees new jobs emerging for ensuring that AI is safe and reliable.

“Business transformation is not just about coding,” Nilekani said. “Seventy percent is governance, change management, transformation, guardrails. How do you make sure AI bots don’t hallucinate? How do you make sure agents don’t go rogue?”

The new jobs will be “in understanding client requirements, in collaborating, in getting people to work together,” he said.

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Indian software outsourcing giants such as Infosys have long depended on armies of engineering graduates to write programs for their global clients. But programming capabilities of models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC are already upending that model. On Tuesday, Nilekani acknowledged that coding was “getting automated” but said that technology accounts for just a fraction in any services project.

The idea that AI is fueling job losses “is all disaster marketing to suit the interests of large capital,” Nilekani said. “The requirement for companies like Infosys or others is actually more than ever before because the transformation of enterprise is a very complex activity, and AI requires you to fundamentally reimagine the way you do business.”

Investors are yet to have that kind of confidence in Infosys’ ability to win over new business. Its shares are down about 45% over the past two years as nervous stockholders have watched coding tools grow more capable with every update. Its shares climbed 3.2% Tuesday, while rival Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. advanced 6.2%.

“We are going to see only more work coming our way,” Nilekani said. “Of course, individual companies will have to get their act together. They’ll have to transform themselves, reskill their workers, build new capabilities. All that is true, but this will only mean more things to be done.”