'You Have To Be AI Fluent For Employment Going Forward': Rishad Premji To NDTV

India has not missed the artificial intelligence (AI) bus and there are several opportunities available for the country's companies, which can help enterprises make use of the technology at scale, Wipro Executive Chairman Rishad Premji has said.

Speaking exclusively to NDTV CEO and Editor-In-Chief Rahul Kanwal on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, Premji emphasised that the people most at risk of losing their jobs because of AI are those who do not adopt the technology. AI fluency, he insisted, is going to be critical for any kind of employment going forward.

To a question on what AI will bring in 2026, the Wipro chairman said organisations will leverage the technology more and more to serve their businesses and their customers. 

"I think the language models don't have enough context and in-depth understanding of the workflow of individual organisations... So there's a huge opportunity in infusing specific context, domain and workflow understanding of organisations into that to make it relevant and really drive production scale. So, I find that presents a huge opportunity for companies," Premji said. 

"There's so much money being spent on infrastructure in many markets, including India and Europe, but ultimately somebody has to drive consumption of that infrastructure to drive returns for organisations. And I think the technology services companies from India have a huge chance to drive their adoption by helping enterprises make use of these technologies at scale," he explained 

On whether India needs to focus on the foundational AI layer instead of the application layer and try and have a DeepSeek moment of its own, the Wipro chairman said it does not make sense for companies like his to invest in replicating those models. Value, he said, can be unlocked in how they can specialise them. 

"So the value is in building highly specialised small language models. We had a conversation yesterday where you can build models that have 50 billion parameters and can do effectively 95% of the work that most large language models can do. So you can be highly specialised. There's a huge opportunity for enterprises to build highly specialised small language models. There's an opportunity for countries like India," he said. 

"These models can be for areas of importance like healthcare, education, agriculture and governance. So there's a huge play in just driving that specialisation as well as focusing on multilingual models. We have a huge opportunity to serve many different languages in our country. And so we, as a company, should focus on where our strengths lie, like talent on scale... We often get hugely focused on building out the technology. The magic is in the implementation of the technology," he maintained. 

India, Premji said, can become the scale deployment engine of the world and also build talent for AI globally, which is a big challenge. 

'Can Catch Up'

Asked whether he agreed with some commentators who say India has missed the AI bus, Premji asserted that is not the case. 

"The AI bus is still very early. A lot of the investments have happened in the infrastructure layer. They haven't happened in the adoption layer. That journey is going to unfold over the next five, seven, ten years. I think there's a huge opportunity for us as companies and as a country to participate in that journey," Premji emphasised.

"I don't believe at all that we have missed the bus. I think the bus is very much in starting mode and we can catch up and jump onto that bus quite easily without falling down," he added.

Layoffs?

To a question on layoffs at IT organisations and how AI will impact the employment environment, Premji said technology services companies have not seen a reduction in the number of people and have actually added more employees over the past few years. 

Jobs, he said, can largely be categorised in four buckets. 

"One is jobs that will get disrupted because of AI, and we have to accept that. Bucket number two is jobs that will get enhanced by AI, so you work with machines and humans to drive that impactfully. Three is jobs that will get created because of AI, and four will be human-only jobs. So we have to think of bucket one and figure out how we can retrain, repurpose those people -  through the right skilling, through the right opportunities - to move into buckets two and three," he said. 

The biggest challenge, the Wipro chairman explained, is getting people to adopt AI, and the people most at risk are those who don't do so. 

"I think it's the responsibility of organisations, industry and government to really give people the comfort that this change is important. AI fluency is the new digital currency. You have to be AI fluent to be relevant to do any kind of job going forward. So it's about how we can help people build those skills. They need to understand that if they disrupt what they are doing today, they still have a future, because the system will beat them anyway if they don't," he maintained.

Tackling Uncertainty

The uncertainty brought in by decisions taken by US President Donald Trump is now much more controlled, Premji said, because people and global companies like his have factored it into their calculus. 

"There was perhaps a little bit of a hiccup in April-May last year when the whole trade discussion unfolded, but I think customers have now learned to move forward knowing that this may be more uncertain than they had planned for," he said. 

"On the situation around visas and immigration, all of us are navigating that by leveraging the talent we already have and focusing more and more on local employment and local hiring. Almost 80% of our talent in the US is local, so we're not as concerned about that. We also focus on building talent locally everywhere in the world, like we have done in India," he added.

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