‘India can build 10x jobs with AI’: Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal talks about impact of AI on jobs

Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal believes that India has the potential to be the global hub for artificial intelligence. In a conversation with ANI, the Ola CEO talked about the power of AI and how it can pivot India’s global position and its impact on the job market. He said, “In India, there are tens of millions of IT services professionals and young people. Today, they are doing some work for global clients. Their work can be 10x more productive. That means not to get jobs that will be one tenth. That means we can bring 10x more jobs to India.”

According to him, AI provides opportunities to increase productivity as a lot of routine tasks would be automated. Hence, it is bound to displace several job roles, he explained, “To quantify is difficult, but I would say AI will create new jobs, AI will take away jobs also." He added that AI will impact the white-collar jobs in the next 5 years the most but not  many blue-collar jobs. This is because right now, AI is present in computers but not in robots to do physical tasks.

He said, “Some jobs will go and productivity will be enhanced. So, the way I think of it, in a very simple sense, AI is going to create a bunch of new kinds of jobs in the future. As a country and as an ecosystem, we have to get half of those jobs built in India. So we have to, we can only do that if we embrace AI. If we become the leaders of embracing AI and because of that, our economy becomes more productive faster and we create the future AI jobs in India for the whole world."

Notably, Krutrim, an AI model, is a brainchild of Aggarwal. As per the company, it can generate texts with “sense of Indian cultural sensibilities and relevance.” It has been rolled out in 22 languages and is available in Beta version since February 2024.