AI will transform India's $280 billion IT sector, but job losses could result from talent gaps: Andrew Ng, cofounder of Coursera

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the skills landscape of India’s $280-billion IT services industry, and failure to upskill quickly could lead to significant job disruption, AI pioneer Andrew Ng said on Monday.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum during a conversation at ET House, Ng—founder of DeepLearning.AI and cofounder of Coursera—said the growing use of AI tools is dramatically widening productivity gaps across professions. “Today, I would not hire a software engineer who does not know how to use AI tools in a fairly sophisticated way,” he said, adding that similar expectations are emerging for roles ranging from marketing and HR to finance and IT operations.

Ng, who previously led Google Brain and served as chief scientist at Baidu, said AI skills are no longer optional for India’s large outsourcing and professional services workforce. “If India’s smart, hard-working professionals can upskill rapidly, the country will continue to deliver tremendous value globally. If not, job displacement could be significant,” he warned.

While acknowledging rapid progress since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Ng cautioned against what he described as excessive hype around artificial general intelligence (AGI). He said large language models (LLMs) are not a path to human-level intelligence and that claims of AGI being imminent are misleading. “Today’s models have consumed more data than any human ever will, yet they’re still dumber than humans in many ways,” he said.

Ng agreed with Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun that LLM-based systems are insufficient to achieve AGI. “LLMs by themselves are not a path to AGI, and no existing technology is,” he said, adding that achieving true AGI would require breakthroughs that are not yet known. He also cautioned that redefining AGI at a lower bar risks misleading businesses, students and policymakers into making flawed long-term decisions.

Despite this, Ng said AI’s current capabilities are already transformative. He expects large-scale changes across industries through business process automation, AI agents and redesigned workflows, even without reaching AGI. “We’ll still be working on this a decade from now,” he said.

Ng said the most common question he hears from CEOs is how to drive meaningful AI adoption. According to him, the biggest challenge is managing change among people, not technology. Many companies, he said, have failed with purely bottom-up experimentation, which often results in isolated efficiency gains rather than transformative outcomes. “The bigger wins come from re-engineering entire workflows, which usually requires top-down leadership,” he said.

He advised business leaders to personally invest time in learning AI fundamentals. “If you’re serious about AI, learn it yourself,” Ng said, noting that even a few hours of structured learning can significantly improve leadership decision-making and resource allocation.

On national AI strategy, Ng said open-source and open-weight models offer a strong path for countries like India to reduce geopolitical risk and retain autonomy. He also criticised tighter immigration policies in the US, calling them a “huge unforced error” that could undermine innovation.

Summing up his message for India, Ng said the disruption caused by AI presents an opportunity to leapfrog. “Ignore the hype, build real skills, and create something bold and new,” he said.