Harnessing The AI Revolution - Imperatives For India’s Policy Makers

"Twelve thousand job cuts at TCS", the headline should be India’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) wake-up call. If the country’s service industry is reshaping its workforce because of recent disruptions, the AI revolution led by generative capabilities and agentic architecture is no longer at the gates. It is in the house.

By 2030, AI would reshape more than thirty-eight million Indian roles. Tasks will change, skills will evolve, and entirely new categories of work will emerge. The real question is not whether AI will alter our economy, but whether India will harness this shift to move from cost efficiency to innovation leadership.

AI is advancing at a blistering pace. Generative tools such as ChatGPT have already redefined content creation and software development, and the current wave, Agentic AI, will go further. These systems will not just answer queries; they will act. Managing supply chains, writing contracts, and booking logistics. Most Indian firms are already experimenting with AI agents or deploying them at scale, underlining that disruption is not a distant prospect but an imminent one. What once took decades in computing is now unfolding in months. Time, not technology, is India’s most significant constraint.

The impact will be most visible in the three pillars of India’s economy: services, manufacturing, and agriculture. Together they account for over 95 percent of national output. 

In services, which contribute more than half of GDP, generative AI is already streamlining code generation, amongst other tasks. Agentic AI will elevate India’s Global Capability Centres (GCCs) beyond operations into innovation hubs that manage platforms, run predictive analytics, and deliver global solutions. With India hosting more than 1,600 GCCs employing 1.6 million professionals, this is an opportunity to shift from being the world’s back office to becoming its innovation lab. The latest disruptions in H-1B visas are also set to accelerate a reverse brain drain, with highly skilled professionals choosing to stay or return to India. This talent inflow strengthens GCCs, equipping them to move up the value chain faster. A software tester in Pune who once checked code line by line may now supervise AI systems that validate code automatically, freeing her to focus on design and problem-solving—a shift from repetitive tasks to higher-value creativity.

Manufacturing and construction contribute a quarter of India’s GDP and are also entering a new phase. Generative AI accelerates design cycles, predictive maintenance, and supply chain optimisation. Agentic AI will go further, enabling autonomous supply chains and intelligent factories. Accenture projects that companies leading in AI adoption can expect productivity gains of about 20 percent, underscoring how early movers will strengthen competitiveness. For India, this is not about cutting jobs but creating smarter ones in robotics, analytics, and systems integration.

Agriculture, which still employs about 40 percent of India’s workforce, can also be transformed. Generative AI already helps with crop forecasting and pest detection. Agentic AI could orchestrate farm-to-table logistics, reduce wastage, and ensure fairer prices. For farmers, that might mean shifting from depending on an intermediary for mandi prices to using an AI-powered platform that connects directly to buyers, turning them from a price-taker into a price-maker.

Across these sectors, the message is clear: generative AI drives efficiency & productivity, while Agentic AI elevates the nature of work. The risk is not in adoption but in failing to build sovereign capacity in compute, data, and platforms so Indian firms and workers capture the value.

India has vision documents aplenty: the India AI Mission, the Semiconductor Mission, Viksit Bharat 2047. But ambition without execution is a mirage. India ranks 36th in frontier tech readiness and 46th in government AI readiness. If we hesitate, global tech majors will seize the rewards while Indian firms adapt on their terms. This moment calls for more than committees. It calls for a war room. A National AI authority, empowered across ministries and reporting directly to the Prime Minister, is essential. As the 1991 reforms reset India’s economy, today’s response must be urgent and centralised. 

The truth is that India has less than two percent of global computing capacity. Our National Supercomputing Mission runs at about 40 petaflops, targeting 66 petaflops by 2025. This is modest compared to the hundreds needed to train frontier models. Even after procuring around 19,000 GPUs, India lags far behind. The data centre gap is starker: India generates about 20 percent of the world’s data but hosts only 3 percent of global capacity. Chip-making is embryonic, with new fabs focused on mature nodes while global leaders move toward sub-10 nanometres. 

Without sovereign compute, hyperscale data centres, and advanced fabs, India cannot build its foundation models or safeguard its data. Worse, without data sovereignty, citizens’ and corporations’ information risks training foreign models sold back to us. 

For three decades, India’s growth was powered by Global Business Services, back-office operations built on cost advantage. AI is eroding that model. The future lies in Global Capability Centres focused on innovation and global R&D. As Accenture research shows, GCCs are becoming reinvention engines, leveraging AI and analytics to drive transformation. To accelerate this shift, the government must provide tax incentives, fast-track approvals, and clear data localisation rules that make India the hub for enterprise data. Shared sovereign cloud facilities can give GCCs and startups the compute they need without depending on foreign hyperscalers. 

What India needs is mission thinking, not incrementalism. Just as the country created ISRO to master space and DRDO to secure defense, it now requires an ISRO-for-AI: a mission authority, centrally funded and empowered to build GPU farms, green data centres, and Indian foundation models trained on our languages and contexts. The government must prime the pump with capital and regulation, industry must co-invest, and academia must anchor frontier research and talent. 

Accenture and Frontier Economics estimate that if India builds this foundation, AI could add US$2 trillion to the economy by 2035, raising annual growth by 1.3 percentage points. That is the scale of opportunity at stake, a once-in-a-generation chance to accelerate development. 

India has been here before. In 1991, the crisis forced reform and opened the gates to three decades of growth. Today, AI disruption presents a moment just as defining. Delay will mean watching from the sidelines as others capture the value. Decisive action, backed by sovereign compute, green data centres, advanced fabs, and an ISRO-for-AI mindset, could make India the world’s AI powerhouse. The AI clock is ticking. The only question is whether India will press snooze or rise to lead. 

Views expressed are personal.

Shashi Bakshi, author and managing director of a global strategy consulting firm, works extensively on AI transformation. 

Anshumaan Mishra, a lawyer and strategy consulting professional, frequently writes on the intersection of law, public policy, and international relations for platforms such as The Financial Express, Deccan Herald, and The Pioneer.