AI Will Not Steal Jobs; It Will Dissect and Unbundle Them, Says Microsoft's Puneet Chandok

AI will not replace jobs but will instead dissect and unbundle them, said Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India & South Asia. “All our jobs are bundles of tasks. AI will unbundle those tasks and force us to rebundle our skills,” he said. He pointed out that that society still operates with an industrial-age mindset where people “learn once and earn for life.”

“That model is over,” Chandok added. Learning today must be continuous and fluid, “like pitching a tent, you move it wherever the opportunity is.” The real threat, he said, is not automation but “the refusal to learn.”

Chandok also spoke about what he called the “inefficiency economy,” highlighting that many trillion-dollar industries benefit from delays and slow processes. The longer something takes, the more a lawyer, consultant, or IT services partner earns.

“AI breaks that model. AI doesn’t bill by the hour. It can draft a contract in 15 seconds,” he said. According to him, the shift toward AI-powered systems means “we are moving from an inefficiency economy to an outcome economy,” one where micro-transactions will dominate.

Explaining the broader transition underway, Chandok said that intelligence itself is becoming a commodity. Today, organisations put intelligence to work by gathering and aligning people, but in the future, “you will buy intelligence the way you buy electricity.”

As intelligence becomes abundant and inexpensive, he said, it will fundamentally reshape how work is done—even imagining a world where one could “plug into a wall socket and access 50 IQ points instantly.”

This shift is already visible in the rapid rise of AI agents. “We are entering the era of agents, LLMs with perception, cognition, and agency,” he said. These systems can observe, think, and act autonomously with user permission, enabling them to navigate unstructured environments and deliver insights. “Soon, each of us will have digital colleagues joining the workforce,” Chandok added.

He stressed that for India, AI is not merely a technological shift but a transformative economic, social, and generational opportunity. “India has laid the foundations, digital rails, public infrastructure, talent, and the world’s largest developer community. These rails now need to evolve from software-defined to AI-defined. That is how India becomes a true frontier nation, delivering AI-driven impact for over a billion people,” he said.

He added that while frontier innovation is crucial, India’s real advantage comes from how quickly new technology spreads across the country. Adoption is rising sharply across sectors, from classrooms to boardrooms, with a majority of knowledge workers, schools and higher-education institutions already using AI.

“Frontier innovation matters, but diffusion matters just as much,” he said.

Chandok made the remarks at an event in New Delhi during Satya Nadella’s second visit to India this year. This comes as Microsoft announced an investment of $17.5 billion over the next four years, its largest investment in Asia.

The investment aims to strengthen India’s cloud and AI infrastructure, talent pipeline, and operational capacity. The announcement came after Nadella’s meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where they discussed ways to accelerate the country’s AI adoption.