Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal sees massive potential for AI development in India, warns ’won’t happen unless…’ | Mint

As India has largest amount of data and largest IT services industry in the world, the country can do to artificial intelligence (AI) what China did to manufacturing, said Ola founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Bhavish Aggarwal on Sunday.

In a post on social media platform X (formerly twitter), Bhavish Aggarwal said: “India has: Largest # of developers in the world. Largest # of silicon designers in the world. Largest amount of data in the world. Largest IT services industry in the world. India can do to AI what China did to manufacturing.”

It “Won’t automatically happen unless we make it happen!” he added.

Earlier also, the Ola founder had called for India to become a global hub for AI-related jobs leveraging its vast pool of IT professionals.

“In India, there are tens of millions of IT services professionals and young people. Today, they are doing some work for global clients. Their work can be 10x more productive. That means not to get jobs that will be one tenth. That means we can bring 10x more jobs to India,” Bhavish Aggarwal had told news agency ANI in an interview on July 7.

“So we have to, we can only do that if we embrace AI. If we become the leaders of embracing AI and because of that, our economy becomes more productive faster and we create the future AI jobs in India for the whole world,” he had said.

On AI’s impact on the job market, Aggarwal had also said: “To quantify is difficult, but I would say AI will create new jobs, AI will take away jobs also.”

The productivity boost due to AI is expected to lead to job displacement in certain areas, but would also create new opportunities in others, and in the near term the biggest impact of AI will be on white-collar jobs rather than blue-collar roles, he added.

Bhavish Aggarwal had also lashed out against “wokeism”.

“They’ve (big-tech companies) become their own sovereigns. Their mindset is that we are setting the rules of the world. All these big tech companies, and I don’t mind saying the names, Microsoft, Google, any of these, Meta, you know, they are setting the rules of the world in their own mind,” the Ola CEO had said. “So, what happened in this case, I’m a user of LinkedIn. I publish my thoughts on LinkedIn frequently and engage with people. I saw that LinkedIn Pay has made that if you don’t enter your pronouns, it’ll refer to you as “they”. And I don’t know when they moved from gender to pronouns. Whereas I’m a man. I mean, I want to be referred to myself as a “he”, but I don’t want to set my pronouns because they’re forcing me to engage with this political philosophy of wokeism by making it sort of mandatory.”