‘50% of the jobs are going to go away but…’: Former HCL CEO issues stark warning at AI Impact Summit

Vineet Nayar, Founder-Chairman of Sampark Foundationa and former CEO of HCL Technologies, has predicted that AI will lead to 50% of the jobs going away. However, also noted that the technology would lead to the creation of another 50% of jobs.

Speaking to news agency ANI on the sidelines of AI Impact Summit, Nayar said, “Two things are very evident- 50% of the jobs are going to go away because they will get automated, but also there will be 50% more jobs. The number of jobs created by using technology is very large…”

“The fact that India is leading the way in reimagining the world with AI is noteworthy. So far, India has been a follower of technology, and it is now seeking global attention by articulating what AI’s use cases should be for social impact. This summit is very timely as it will change the vocabulary of India’s participation in redefining AI and its impact” he added

Nayar on how to create employment in AI era:

Speaking during his address at the AI Impact Summit, Nayar noted that private companies will be profit-driven and thinking that they will create employment is akin to ‘dreaming’

“the question is how do we create employment in this environment, and that employment comes from mass scale startups, which is what this government has already doing” he said

Nayar also talked about the need to protect the data of Indian users, stating, “I think we as Indians have to be very careful on who does data belong to and that is the debate we have a problem with. The LLM models which exist worldwide are far superior than the Indian models. Unfortunately, in India, we never develop products, so therefore we do not have SLMs and LLMs which are world-class.”

“On one side, we have global LLM products which are coming to India and trading on our Indian data. Should we allowed that or should we not allowed that? But on the other side if we don’t allow that then we have the data but we don’t have the LLM models. So, how do we encourage technology completely to develop the LLM models. This needs radicals strategic thinking and a very important aspect otherwise we will either give up our data.” he further added

He further noted that it is important to categorize ‘who does this data belong’ and what are the kind of incentives that could be given to develop LLM or Small Language Models (SLMs) faster on the data of Indian users.

“we will do all these kind of press releases but the India will lose a competitive advantage on something which is very critical for the next decade.” he said