CEA Nageswaran cautions private sector about need to strike a balance between AI & labour

Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran warns private sector against excessive AI use, emphasizing need for job creation in India.

Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran on Thursday (May 29, 2025) cautioned the private sector against the possible over-deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to the detriment of labour, saying that India was a country that needs eight million additional jobs every year.

Speaking to gathered industry leaders at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s Annual Business Summit 2025, Mr. Nageswaran said that the deployment of end-to-end AI systems was a business policy choice and was not inevitable, and that companies could decide for themselves where to stop AI deployment and instead use labour.

“Going forward, in our country, while we understand that competitiveness and productivity considerations would require an increase in the number of GPUs, artificial intelligence engines being deployed, etc, we are a country which has to create 8 million livelihoods every year at minimum, excluding agriculture,” Mr. Nageswaran pointed out.

 “And therefore, we have to have policies that rely on capital led growth but also policies — and this is not just the government, but policies in the private sector — that are able to focus on labour intensive manufacturing as well,” he added.

The Chief Economic Advisor went on to say that this is a topic, where, rather than relying on public policy actions, this dialogue has to take place within the business community and with the government.

Mr. Nageswaran’s statements come a day after TCS chairman N. Chandrasekaran, in the company’s annual report, spoke about how “the rise of autonomous robots and AI agents promises a future of ‘dark factories’ and AI-assisted enterprise functions”. 

AI-powered ‘dark factories’ are manufacturing units that function with minimum human involvement.