Calm before AI storm: A moment to prepare

India would benefit from launching a national initiative dedicated to building domestic capability in agentic AI

- Vivek Wadhwa

In "The Driver in the Driverless Car," I warned of a coming storm: A jobless future driven by automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI). That future is no longer on the horizon—it has begun.

But unlike in the West, where entire white-collar industries are already being restructured by AI, India has a bit more time. Not because it is more insulated, but because so much of its infrastructure still needs to be built—smart cities, modern digital systems, and scalable platforms for a billion-plus people.

That breathing room is a gift. But treating it as a license for complacency would be a costly mistake.

Let's be clear: The foundational work done by India's IT services industry—code maintenance, software patching, integration testing, report generation, and process documentation—is squarely in the crosshairs of the next wave of AI. That wave is now forming.

At a recent Google event, DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis laid out what's coming. He warned that within a decade, we may reach artificial general intelligence—the holy grail of AI, where machines exhibit human-level cognition. But the disruption won't wait that long. It is already underway in the form of agentic AI—software systems that don't just answer questions, but break down problems, reason through them, and take action. These systems are becoming capable of handling complex workflows with minimal human oversight. That's a polite way of saying: They can already do the kind of work that much of India's IT sector depends on.