India must not chase flashy AI, but focus on jobs and impact

New Delhi: India must stop chasing flashy AI breakthroughs and instead focus on practical, people-first deployment if it wants AI to deliver jobs, productivity and strategic autonomy, Economic Survey has said, pitching a new AI Economic Council to manage the transition in a labour-rich country. The survey concluded with a blunt bottom line - India's advantage is not brute computing power but population-scale deployment, diverse data and human capital.

The survey noted that AI was no longer experimental. Globally, 88% of organisations already use AI in at least one business function, though only 7% have fully integrated it, showing most firms are still in the learning phase. Infrastructure, however, is highly unequal with 73% of the world's data centres in high-income countries, while India hosts just about 3%, exposing a serious compute gap as demand for AI accelerates.


The survey proposed setting up a dedicated AI Economic Council, separate from technical regulators. Its central task would be to control the pace of AI adoption, work with industry on a 10-year deployment roadmap, and map which jobs will be automated, which will be augmented, and where displacement could hit hardest. The goal will be to prevent unchecked automation from destabilising employment while aligning AI rollouts with skilling and education reforms.

Unlike traditional regulators, the council would operate with clear social goals. Every major AI rollout would need to show net public benefit - through jobs, productivity or better services. Policies would be designed around labour realities, with impact assessments built in. Adoption would be sequenced as "deploy now", "pilot" or "defer", depending on readiness of skills, data and institutions. Ethical red lines would be drawn around surveillance, worker monitoring and algorithmic bias. The survey also flagged a quieter risk - over-reliance on large language models.