Talent in the AI age: Code coolies to core engineers

For decades, India’s most talented engineers served like coolies for American corporations.

- Vivek Wadhwa

Many were sent on H-IB visas to handle the work few others wanted: maintaining aging systems, cleaning up bloated codebases, migrating databases at odd hours, and keeping global enterprises running in the background. The arrangement generated prosperity and foreign exchange, and it built formidable Indian IT giants. Yet it also meant that too much of India’s technical talent was confined to sustaining other nations’ systems instead of building its own. Engineers were treated as low-cost labour rather than as co-creators of intellectual property —and then disparaged for supposedly taking American jobs. The trade-off was accepted because it delivered growth; it also postponed a deeper transformation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now forcing a reckoning, because the playing field has shifted, and for the first time in centuries, India has the tools to build its own future rather than serve someone else's.

At the recent India AI Impact Summit, V Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras, called AI disruption a blessing in disguise for core engineers. He argued that India has invested heavily in training mechanical, civil, electrical, and biotech engineers, only to see them drift into generic IT roles because that’s where the jobs and money were, a misallocation of national resources. As AI automates coding, testing, documentation, and maintenance, that door closes. Core engineers will have stronger incentives to remain in their disciplines, reskill with AI, and apply it to real problems in infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, and medicine — precisely where India needs them.