Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran on Thursday (May 29, 2025) cautioned the private sector against the possible over-deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to the detriment of labour, saying that India was a country that needs eight million additional jobs every year.
| Photo Credit: ANI
Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran on Thursday (May 29, 2025) cautioned the private sector against the possible over-deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to the detriment of labour, saying that India was a country that needs eight million additional jobs every year.
Speaking to gathered industry leaders at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s Annual Business Summit 2025, Mr. Nageswaran said that the deployment of end-to-end AI systems was a business policy choice and was not inevitable, and that companies could decide for themselves where to stop AI deployment and instead use labour.
“Going forward, in our country, while we understand that competitiveness and productivity considerations would require an increase in the number of GPUs, artificial intelligence engines being deployed, etc, we are a country which has to create 8 million livelihoods every year at minimum, excluding agriculture,” Mr. Nageswaran pointed out.
“And therefore, we have to have policies that rely on capital led growth but also policies — and this is not just the government, but policies in the private sector — that are able to focus on labour intensive manufacturing as well,” he added.
The Chief Economic Advisor went on to say that this is a topic, where, rather than relying on public policy actions, this dialogue has to take place within the business community and with the government.
TCS chairman on AI-assisted enterprise
Mr. Nageswaran’s statements come a day after TCS chairman N. Chandrasekaran, in the company’s annual report, spoke about how “the rise of autonomous robots and AI agents promises a future of ‘dark factories’ and AI-assisted enterprise functions”.
AI-powered ‘dark factories’ are manufacturing units that function with minimum human involvement.
In his address, Mr. Nageswaran went on to cite a paper by an independent AI analyst in Berkeley, California, which pointed out that building end-to-end AI agents is a technological and policy choice, or business decision.
“You don’t have to train AI end-to-end,” Mr. Nageswaran told the gathered industry leaders. “You can decide where to stop, and where to deploy human labour as well. Striking the right balance between AI deployment and labour is actually a business decision choice and is not inevitable. This is something we need to consciously internalise.”
The CEA went on to again point out that the Indian private sector was facing a challenge where the growth in their profitability has not only exceeded the growth in their capital formation, but has also exceeded the growth in compensation, which includes hiring as well.
This situation, he said, was “something we can ill-afford for the next 25-30 years”.
Published – May 29, 2025 02:45 pm IST
