'White-collar worker resentment could wreck AI': Nandan Nilekani flags diffusion as the real challenge

India AI Summit 2026 | Infosys non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani on Thursday warned that artificial intelligence could face a backlash if its benefits do not reach people at scale. He cautioned that resentment among white-collar workers could derail the technology's promise.

Nilekani suggested that the debate should move beyond foundation models to focus on diffusion - the process of taking AI to a billion people. "It's great what the foundations models are doing and the speed of evolution, but what we have learned is that diffusion of technology is a different ballgame," he said during a fireside chat at the India AI Summit. "And how do you get technology to a billion people, and in India, we have a little bit of experience with that."

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Nilekani, who conceptualised and spearheaded the Aadhar programme, cited India's Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) as evidence of population-scale deployment. "1.4 billion people on Aadhaar, 500 billion people on UPI, 20 billion transactions a month, the world's largest cash transfer system, the largest financial inclusion system, you name it. We learned that diffusion is a technique. It's both an art and a science."

He said diffusion involves institutions, policymaking, dealing with incumbents, and newcomers for execution. "If all the investments in AI are going to deliver the value to society, not just to individuals, we'll have to look at diffusion pathways to take this to everyone," the tech titan said.

The Infosys co-founder further said that he has always been saying that India should focus on becoming the use case capital of the world. He said everybody agrees that AI is like a general-purpose technology. "It's about starting from the user and how we can improve their lives, how we can take a billion people and help them to learn better, how we can take a billion people and give them better healthcare, how can we take half a billion farmers and improve their earnings. You have to start from there, and then figure out how to make it happen."

According to him, AI is not just a technology; it's about institutions, trust building, negotiations, and guardrails. "It's about working with different stakeholders and making them go towards a common vision. So, diffusion is difficult. It's not a simple task. So I feel that India will demonstrate this because we have the experience of diffusion at the population scale in all the various areas."

Nilekani then said he believes that in AI right now, there's a race to the top and a race to the bottom. "And the race to the bottom is faster than the race to the top. So, all of us who have a stake in AI being useful to humanity have to accelerate and redouble our efforts to make the diffusion happen," he said. "Otherwise, the consequences are going to be very difficult. Because there's going to be a backlash."

"If the only thing that AI does is create deep fakes or raise the price of your power bill or all the other things that are happening, people are going to respond. The resentment of the blue-collar worker led to the train wreck of globalisation. The resentment of the white-collar worker is going to lead to the train wreck of AI. So we really have to work very hard to show profound, useful cases of AI," he added.