Early souring of an AI dream

THither is a sure irony in the information at present circulating through and through the inboxes of tech journalists. It does not originate from a think tank or any multilateral institution. Instead, it comes from a US-based construction technology firm called Planera. A study by this firm ranks Malta, a Mediterranean island with just 333,000 workers, as the world’s most Artificial Intelligence (AI)-exposed economy.It simply means nearly half its workforce is in roles that machines can already replicate. After Malta come Canada, Greece, Cyprus, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United States, Spain, Belgium and Italy.This implication is counter-intuitive. The most immediate disruption will not be on factory floors, but in cognitive and service work. Think routine administration, retail counters, hospitality desks, and back-office ledgers. This is where AI has advanced rapidly over the past two years.India does not appear on this list. But this absence does not imply resilience. For three decades, India’s growth model has been built on the back of a large, English-speaking labour force. Think BPO, IT-enabled services, data processing, and customer support. These are not peripheral layers of the economy; they are its scaffolding. Unfortunately, they have now started to resemble ‘commodity labour’.This means that across IT services firms and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) operators, entry-level hiring is being pared back as chatbots and autonomous agents assume first-line responsibilities. This aligns with global estimates from the IMF and the World Economic Forum, which suggest that around 40% of jobs worldwide are exposed to AI-led disruption.This asymmetry is structural. Some countries will absorb this shock by augmenting labour and retraining at scale. Others risk being stranded with yesterday’s comparative advantage.Conversations with policymakers and industry participants point to a familiar exasperation: the horizon of decision-making rarely extends beyond the next election cycle. Meanwhile, blue-collar jobs that ought to remain competitive are slipping away as workers drift back from cities amid persistent shortages of basic services.The only durable response, then, lies in creating new categories of work and drawing investment into emerging sectors. But the gap between intent and execution remains wide. The Uttar Pradesh government’s ₹25,000 crore memorandum with Bengaluru-based startup Puch AI, signed in March and positioned as a cornerstone AI infrastructure push, collapsed within days after due diligence flagged insufficient financial depth. It now stands as a cautionary example of how quickly ambition can outrun capacity.Taken together, these signals are beginning to shape how parts of the investment community view India’s position in an AI-led economy. One early-stage investor tracking these shifts described it bluntly: India, he said, is starting to look like “the global anti-AI bet.”That assessment may sound extreme, but its underlying logic is harder to dismiss. As AI capabilities deepen, India’s dependence on imported chips and electronics is likely to rise. Its software services sector remains tethered to platforms and clients outside its control. Routine services employment faces erosion. Remittances from the Gulf could come under pressure if those economies pivot more aggressively toward automation. Each of these pressures feeds into the same outcome: a more fragile external account.There are early indications that global capital is responding to this mix. Co-founder of Zerodha Nithin Kamath recently captured a sentiment he encountered in conversation with an industry participant: investor interest in allocating fresh capital to India, he was told, has “pretty much died out,” with concerns ranging from limited AI-linked opportunities to rich valuations and macroeconomic exposure. Capital is scanning markets such as Japan, Taiwan, Korea and parts of Europe with greater urgency.While not yet a settled trend, it is an early signal worth paying attention to. Conversations with people deep inside the policy and business ecosystem reveal a quiet despair. A young technocrat who spent several years working on one of India’s largest public technology projects now speaks of preparing to leave the country. “I am probably going to leave the country, something I never thought I’d do,” he shared on WhatsApp.When asked if he would come on the record, he was more precise: “If you do choose to take up the mantle of writing about this, I just want you to know what people actually think. Because we’ve reached the stage of delusion in this country, where even though you can see the sky falling, you are punished for looking up.”The risk, then, for contemporary India is not that work disappears. It is that the categories of work on which it scaled begin to erode faster than new ones are created.The risk to half of Malta’s workers offers a contained warning. India’s exposure is of a different order entirely. The question is not whether the shift is coming; it is whether India recognises it early enough to respond with intent and execute to plan.(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com)