'College lecturing will be fully automated': Sanjeev Sanyal warns of AI disruption in academia

Artificial intelligence (AI) will render traditional undergraduate lectures unnecessary, economist Sanjeev Sanyal has said, arguing that AI can deliver, translate, and personalise the best academic content at scale. "You don't need to spend four years in a university listening to something you can just as easily learn from AI," Sanyal said in a podcast hosted by the Indian School of Business (ISB).

"You can get AI to deliver lectures. And even if you don't want AI to deliver lectures — you can get the best lecturer in the world to do it and AI will simultaneously translate it to any language you want," he said. "Either which way, you can get the very best of any subject out there virtually for free, available to every person who cares about that particular subject, and AI can even answer your questions."

He noted that unless the subject is extremely specialised or still evolving, such as some areas at the PhD level, most undergraduate and many master's courses are based on standardised content. "That does not require regular lectures anymore," he said.

"Why do you need to come spend four years in a university listening to something — or sit at home and listen to it?" he asked. "Not only will the AI teach it to you in more interesting ways, it will answer your questions, it will even test you, certify you. So the lecturing part of it will now get completely automated. It is better done by AI than it is by humans."

Sanyal, who also serves on the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, said universities will have to reinvent themselves. "You can't cut a cadaver on AI," he remarked, pointing to fields such as medicine that still require physical presence. But for most theoretical disciplines, AI could make tertiary education "very, very cheap - or even free."

He argued that AI will remove disparities between institutions by offering equal access to high-quality education regardless of location. "The same AI is running everywhere...Whether you're in Harvard or Bathinda, the access to knowledge is the same," he said. Learners could also design their own interdisciplinary paths and progress at their own pace.

Sanyal said this shift will extend beyond formal education, with lifelong learning becoming the norm. "The person who is the most outdated is the guy who takes the most decisions," he said, criticising a system where people complete education in their early 20s and then work for decades with little knowledge renewal.

He acknowledged that AI will disrupt jobs, but compared the shift to the rise of social media, which also displaced older roles while creating new ones like influencers and podcasters. His deeper concern lies in how AI may evolve beyond human understanding. "We are a lazy race...Even if it is benign, if we don't understand it, it will 100% break down from time to time," he warned, citing a recent example where a single faulty line of code shut down banks and airports.

Sanyal has consistently advocated AI-driven changes in education. At an event with the Bharat Chamber of Commerce in October last year, he said students would no longer need to go to colleges except for collaborative work, and that undergraduate education could be made completely free. In March, he reiterated on X, "AI allows for top-quality university education to be made available for free...Those who wish to attend an old-style bricks university can continue to do so, but freely available university education is a game changer."