Amid persistent anxieties that artificial intelligence (AI) will displace human workers, Arundhati Bhattacharya, president and CEO of Salesforce–South Asia, on Thursday offered a different perspective, arguing that AI is not a threat to jobs but a strategic tool that could help developing economies enhance service delivery in healthcare, education and the public sector.
Pointing to divergent dynamics in advanced and developing economies, Bhattacharya, in a keynote address at the Infocom 2025, a flagship event of the ABP Group, said advanced economies stand to benefit by deploying AI and robotic agents to counter labour shortages.
“In the developed world, there is already a labour shortage. The next wave is going to be robotic agents, and that is where they will be able to make good of their loss of labour. It may not go entirely, but to some extent, sure,” she said, adding that the context of developing countries like India is different.
“In the developing world, there is no shortage of people. But I think there is a big reason to lean into AI. We (India) are a very populous nation, and in a brick and mortar manner, there is no way that you can give the service that these people actually deserve, whether it be services like medicine, education or citizen services that the government should provide,” Bhattacharya said.
She pointed to crowded classrooms and overstretched state hospitals as examples of systemic limitations that AI can help ease. “If we want to improve the quality of life of the people who go to state hospitals, if we want to improve the kind of pedagogy that we can give to 60 students in a class, AI at long last allows us to do all of these — allows us to target treatment, create tailored curricula for students, allows a person who may not be very good in communication to write an intelligible letter,” she said.
Bhattacharya said AI can act as a catalyst for restoring human dignity in essential services. “For the first time, we are getting a chance in this technological age for humans to become more human,” she said. “But we have to do it well. We have to remember that there is an ethical use for it, if we do it for the benefit of mankind, if we do it without allowing it to become the controlling factor, if we do it with full understanding of how we control it, guard it and direct it,” she added.
Industry leaders at the Infocom echoed her stance. Bhaskar Ghosh, chief strategy and innovation officer at Accenture, said AI should be viewed as a capability multiplier rather than a headcount reducer. “Suppose I have to lift a weight, maybe I will be able to lift 50 kg. But with a machine, I can lift 500 kg with lesser effort. Think of AI as exactly the same thing, only instead of lifting weights, it can enhance the IQ of the workers. We should use AI not for replacing workers but to enhance the capability of each and every person in the enterprise with the power of AI,” Ghosh said.
“What I strongly believe in the next 3-5 years down the line, every individual in the world will have a personal cognitive brain. Every business will have a digital enterprise brain and every nation will have a national digital brain,” Ghosh added
Bishwajit Mohapatra, head of customer solutions and CIO advisory at AWS, drew parallels with the cloud revolution. He recalled similar fears in the late 2000s that operational engineers would become redundant. “With the explosion of cloud technology, more opportunities have opened up. We are exactly at the same inflexion point. But the fundamentals are not going to change,” he said.