India needs to act quickly to upskill its workforce, given the need to create at least eight million jobs a year as artificial intelligence (AI)-driven productivity tests the country’s ability to boost education and skills and expand labour-intensive industries, chief economic adviser V Anantha Nageswaran said on Monday.
In a virtual speech at the AI 2026 Summit, Nageswaran said that if AI displaces humans faster than humans can be trained, if productivity grows without employment elasticity, and if institutional reform does not lack technological adoption, there is a risk that India will miss its demographic window and inequality will widen precisely at the moment of greatest technological change.
“For advanced economies facing demographic decline, AI can serve as a complement. For India, this is a stress test of our state capacity. Time is not abstract for us. Every year we have to create millions of productive, decent jobs or livelihoods. Every year of delay increases the pressure. Every year of shift narrows our options,” Nageswaran said.
Demographic urgency
He pointed out that demographics create opportunity but also urgency. The chief economic adviser said only a small portion of India’s workforce has received formal skills training. “This gap is not just a statistic, it is a structural vulnerability,” Nageswaran said.
He stressed the need to decisively strengthen basic education, expand high-quality skills, expand labor-intensive service sectors, remove regulatory barriers to the expansion of labor-intensive services, and ensure the calibrated deployment of AI. Failure to meet these goals would mean not only wasting an opportunity but creating inevitable social and economic instability, Nageswaran warned.
“But fortunately, the alternative remains within reach. With foresight, institutional discipline, and relentless execution, India can become the first major society to demonstrate that human abundance and machine intelligence can reinforce, not undermine, each other,” Nageswaran said.
“This will not become a drift. It will require urgency, it will require political will, it will require state capacity and it will require a clear national commitment to align technology adoption with mass employability. It has to be a team India effort, including the private sector and academics as well as policy makers. The window is still open, but it is not indefinite,” added Nageswaran.
He said that for India, this is not a debate about the future of work – it is a decision about the future of growth, social stability and cohesion. “We need to act and act now. The first step starts with reforming our education and pedagogy and teaching and imparting basic skills. And that’s where the journey to co-creating prosperity with AI and employability in the age of AI begins,” he said.