Davos 2026: Automation Anywhere's Ankur Kothari says real AI revolution is in factories and hospitals, not labs

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, while much of the conversation focused on superintelligence and trillion-parameter AI models, Ankur Kothari, Co-founder and COO of Automation Anywhere, offered a clear counterpoint: the real AI revolution is not happening in research labs. It is taking shape inside factories, hospitals, banks and government offices.

“Rarely comes a technology that gets discussed in boardrooms and at the kitchen table at the same time,” Kothari told Business Today. “That’s what AI is.”

But while much of the global conversation is dominated by debates on compute power and large language models, Kothari believes the true transformation lies in applied AI, the systems that actually get work done.

“There’s this other camp,” he said. “Application of AI. Applied AI. That’s where companies and countries use AI to create autonomous systems, process financial work, deliver care and orchestrate operations.”

Many companies, he said, struggle to derive real value from AI despite strong leadership support. The reason is structural. Businesses operate across multiple systems, workflows and human decision loops. Yet most AI pilots are deployed in isolation.

“They want to break silos, but they apply AI in a silo,” he said. “They sprinkle it on a broken process. Those pilots fail.”

The winners, Kothari argues, are organisations that think in terms of outcomes, orchestrating work across people, agents and systems.

This shift is especially powerful for India.

“India has a tremendous advantage,” he said. “We have the world’s biggest processes, a massive population and huge datasets.” As India builds agentic and applied AI systems at scale, Kothari believes it can export an entirely new operating model for how work gets done globally.

In healthcare, for example, AI agents can handle administrative systems and workflows, allowing doctors and nurses to focus on patient care, reduce wait times and improve outcomes.

“Instead of fighting systems and processes, healthcare workers can work with agents,” he said.

On jobs, Kothari sees AI as an amplifier, not a replacement. The real value comes from augmenting human capability, not eliminating it.

AI will be with us for decades, he said, just as networks transformed work in the internet era. The mistake is to treat it as a short-term cost-cutting tool.

“This is a long-term platform shift.”

And while governance will evolve differently across countries, one principle is universal: autonomy must come with observability and auditability.

As for whether AI is a force for good?

“Paralysing fear moves innovation somewhere else,” Kothari said. “It’s about understanding it, shaping it and having open dialogue. If you shape it, it becomes more good than bad.”

In the next phase of the AI revolution, Kothari’s message is clear: the future will belong not to those who build the smartest models, but to those who apply intelligence to real-world work.

Watch the full interview here