Upskill Early or Fall Behind: Sanjeev Bikchandani’s AI Advice to Young Professionals at IndiaAI Summit

His message to the youth is clear: AI is not the threat. Not learning it is.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani
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At a time when anxiety around Artificial Intelligence replacing jobs is rising, Info Edge founder Sanjeev Bikchandani told young professionals that if AI is adopted early, it can boost productivity rather than eliminate roles.

Speaking on the sidelines of the IndiaAI Summit during a session titled ‘The Future of Employability in the Age of AI’, Bikchandani urged the youth to focus less on systemic concerns and more on individual preparedness.

“To all the young people here, you don't worry about system problems or policy issues. You just worry about your job and your individual career. Just think what should you do so that AI does not make you lose your job and instead help you get a job,” he said.

According to him, the key lies in upskilling early. He advised young professionals to familiarise themselves with at least 10 to 15 useful AI tools, pointing out that younger employees have a natural advantage. In many organisations, older employees may not adapt as quickly to emerging tools, creating an opportunity for younger talent to lead AI adoption internally.

Bikchandani also illustrated how AI is being deployed from a financial and operational standpoint. In cases where companies have thousands of low-paying clients, it does not make financial sense to deploy human staff to manually service each account. Instead, AI-powered chatbots and voice bots are being used to automate calls and customer engagement, often at a level where users cannot distinguish between a bot and a human.

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“You can sit in office and make phone calls to the bottom 5,100 clients who really don’t pay that much. It doesn’t make financial sense to have a person holding them and calling on them. So we put a chatbot, a voice bot automatically calls, you can’t make out it’s not a human being. That’s how advanced it is,” he said.

The result, he argued, is not job displacement but expanded market reach. By automating previously unviable segments, companies are able to serve underserved markets that were earlier ignored due to cost constraints.

“Now what is happening here is stuff that is not getting done, we have served an underserved segment by using AI. Thus nobody is thrown out of a company because of AI. Right now it’s being used to increase productivity, it is being used to do stuff better,” he added.

His message to the youth was clear: AI is not the threat. Not learning it is.

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