90 million jobs at risk? Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani’s big AI warning

Speaking at the Infosys Investor AI Day 2026, Nilekani described the AI revolution as far more transformative than previous technology waves.

“This is a much more fundamental change to the way businesses will operate,” he was quoted as saying by News18.

Drawing comparisons with earlier technological shifts such as smartphones and cloud computing, Nilekani said AI cannot be treated as a simple upgrade.

“When smartphones came, we could build applications from PC to phones by changing the front end. When cloud came, we could lift and shift applications from on-premise to the cloud. But this time, it is not like that. It’s a fundamental change in the way we do things. We cannot run business the old way,” he said.

He noted that the transition will significantly reshape skills and hiring patterns.

“It’s a huge challenge for talent. Writing code will no longer be the ultimate goal. It will be about making AI work and orchestrating it. So, jobs will change,” Nilekani said.

He also pointed to the long-standing issue of legacy systems in enterprises.

“Over the last 60–70 years, companies didn’t replace legacy systems; they kept adding to them. If firms truly want to take advantage of AI, they must fundamentally clean this up. It’s a massive clean-up job that everybody is dealing with,” he said.

In a statement, Infosys said it has unveiled its AI-first value framework to help global enterprises unlock AI at scale, leveraging its generative and agentic AI suite, Infosys Topaz.

The company said this strategy opens a new frontier in IT services and could enable it to tap into an incremental AI-first services opportunity worth $300–400 billion by 2030, citing a recent report by NASSCOM and McKinsey & Company.

Infosys added that it is collaborating with 90% of its top 200 clients on AI initiatives and currently has more than 4,600 AI projects underway. The company has developed over 30 new service offerings across six value pools, with clients increasingly viewing Infosys as a preferred partner for driving revenue growth, cost optimisation and innovation through AI.