'What will happen in future...': Narayana Murthy on why some programmers won’t survive AI

Who will survive the age of AI? Not every software engineer. Not even most. The future will leave many behind.

That’s the stark implication from Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy, who told Moneycontrol that the rise of generative AI is already reshaping what it means to be valuable in tech — and who gets left out.

Murthy shared that he recently used OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 to prepare a speech, a task that previously took him 25–30 hours. With AI, he did it in just five. “I improved my own productivity by as much as five times,” he said.

But for Murthy, this isn’t just about saving time. It’s a signal. AI won’t eliminate software jobs, he said — it will expose which engineers truly understand their craft. “Unless you ask the right question, you won’t get the right output.”

He likened the moment to the arrival of computers in Britain’s banking sector in the 1970s — a shift that unions resisted, fearing job loss. But instead of layoffs, the industry saw a 40- to 50-fold increase in employment. Murthy believes Indian tech can experience the same — if it adapts.

The job of a coder, he emphasized, is evolving. It's no longer about writing lines of code, but about defining complex problems and using tools like AI to solve them. "Our programmers and analysts will become smarter and smarter... They will solve bigger problems, more complex problems,” he said.

Murthy’s message is clear: AI won’t replace software engineers. But it will redefine who counts as one.