- India must rethink jobs, skills, and higher education to prepare for AI's impact on work
- Rajiv Memani emphasized adopting AI fully across government, industry, and infrastructure
- Energy costs and data centers are crucial for AI growth, with India at 7-8 cents per unit
India must rethink jobs, skills and even the shape of higher education as AI scales, said Rajiv Memani, Chairman and CEO, EY India, and President, CII. He argues that the country should prepare now for a fast shift in work and capability, not wait for disruption to arrive.
“In the AI context, the nature of jobs will change,” Memani said. “And I think as a country we'll have to now start seeing how do we prepare, how do we change our education system? What are the kind of universities that we want to have? Do you want to have as many universities? I'll be provocative here. Or do you need more vocational institutes.”
He said India cannot shy away from AI at full scale. “India cannot shy away from adopting AI at full scale. Whether it's government, whether it's industries, the infrastructure that's required, I think that we need to do.” He added that AI's growth “depends largely on data centers, depends largely on data and energy.”
Memani placed energy economics at the heart of AI capacity. “One search on ChatGPT consumes 12 times the amount of energy one search on Google does. So that's the number that we are talking about.”
He noted energy costs vary sharply by region. “In US, the energy cost is 18 cents. In Europe, it's even higher than the 18 cents. In Middle East, it's 4 cents. India will be 7 to 8 cents.” He said India can do very well if it accelerates its energy transition and builds efficient data infrastructure.
Using data centers as a test case, Memani projected 7 to 8 gigawatts of capacity in five years, with capex of roughly Rs 12 lakh crore. “Out of that, 8 to 8.5 lakh crore will be imported. Is there a way that out of that 8, 8.5 lakh crore we can adopt, we can do domestic manufacturing for 4 to 5 lakh crore. Can we have a proactive strategy for that?” He said India should be the fastest adopter of AI, turn use cases into a “massive competitive advantage,” and become the use case capital of the world.
He underscored protections and guardrails. “Building the protection that's required, whether it's in terms of cyber protection, personal protection, data protection, integrity, and others,” he said, adding that the DPDP Act is a start and “many versions of that will come.”
On jobs, Memani said India must reimagine opportunities for 15 to 20 million young entrants each year. If manufacturing accelerates with recent trade deals and reforms, “blue collared workers will come back much more emphatically.” He urged society to embrace them and build skills at the high end, the mid tier and the shop floor together.
