AGI: Can India turn disruption into opportunity?

If AGI is as close as experts suggest, India must prepare for opportunity and disruption

In his recent Independence Day address from the Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an ambitious target: to skill one crore young Indians in Artificial Intelligence within a year. The announcement is significant for a country whose young population will enter a workplace increasingly shaped by AI. But the next question is much bigger: what happens if AI itself takes another giant leap: from today’s increasingly capable systems to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?

Demis Hassabis, the Nobel-winning scientist who has spent much of his career pursuing AGI, recently stepped back from the day-to-day running of Google DeepMind to focus more closely on its long-term development. “I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” he told colleagues.

If AGI is indeed approaching, India’s challenge will not simply be to train one crore people to use today’s AI. It will be to prepare an entire generation for a world in which machines may be capable of learning and performing a far wider range of intellectual tasks.

If someone who has spent much of his career pursuing AGI now believes it is “close at hand”, India needs to ask a practical question: are we ready?

AGI not simply a better LLM

We already use AI to write emails, translate languages, create images, analyse data, write code and answer questions. AI agents are beginning to go further, planning and carrying out tasks on our behalf.

AGI would be a bigger step. It would be an AI system able to perform a wide range of intellectual tasks, much as a capable human can move between mathematics, writing, research and problem-solving.

Nobody knows exactly when this will happen and experts disagree about how close we are. But India does not need to predict the exact date to prepare for the possibility.

The opportunity: intelligence for every Indian

For India, perhaps the greatest promise of AGI is the possibility of making expertise more accessible.

Consider education. Imagine a child in a small town having a personal tutor available at any time, able to explain mathematics in Hindi, English or another Indian language, adjust the explanation when the child is struggling, create exercises and patiently try another approach.

This is not entirely futuristic. ‘Sampurna Shiksha Kavach’, an AI-enabled personalised-learning programme supported by NITI Aayog, has reached more than 2.85 lakh students across Jharkhand, Bihar, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh. AGI could potentially take such personalised assistance much further, making it more capable and widely available.

But AGI should not mean replacing teachers. Education is not merely the delivery of information. Teachers motivate, understand emotions, build confidence, teach values and help children learn to work with others. The likely future is teachers working with increasingly capable AI.

Healthcare offers another powerful example. India has excellent doctors and medical institutions, but specialist expertise is not evenly distributed. AI is already being used for diagnostics, clinical decision support, drug discovery and disease surveillance.

Consider eye care. Smartphone-based AI systems are being developed and used in India to screen for conditions such as diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration. AGI could eventually extend this idea far beyond individual diagnostic tasks, helping doctors in smaller towns draw on a much wider pool of medical knowledge.

It would not replace the doctor. It could extend the doctor’s reach.

The same principle could apply to agriculture, scientific research, financial services, Government and small businesses. A small entrepreneur could potentially access sophisticated assistance in marketing, finance, law and technology without hiring several specialists.

AGI could therefore become a great leveller: making some forms of expertise abundant that are today scarce and expensive.

The disruption: what happens to India’s jobs?

This is the other side of the story, and perhaps the more difficult one.

India’s economic success has been built partly on millions of people performing cognitive and service-oriented work in IT, software development, business-process outsourcing, customer support, finance and other knowledge services.

What happens if increasingly capable AI can perform much of this work?

Vinod Khosla, the Indian-origin technology investor, has offered one of the most striking forecasts. He has argued that AI could perform 80 per cent of the economically valuable work humans do within five years. That is a forecast, not a certainty, but it highlights a serious issue for India: what happens to the first rung of the employment ladder if AI becomes capable of doing much of the routine work through which young people traditionally enter professional careers?

Sam Altman offers a somewhat different perspective. In May 2026, the OpenAI chief said he no longer expected the kind of “jobs apocalypse” that some in the technology industry had predicted, noting that AI had not eliminated as many entry-level white-collar jobs as he had earlier expected. But he also acknowledged that work will change.

The disagreement is important. Nobody knows precisely how employment will evolve. The more immediate lesson for India is that it cannot assume that the jobs which powered its services economy will remain unchanged.

From demographic dividend to AI dividend

For decades, India has spoken of its demographic dividend, a large young population entering the workforce. But a young population becomes an economic advantage only when it has the skills the economy needs.

AGI could make that challenge both more difficult and more promising.

India will need people who can work with AI, question AI, verify AI and use AI to solve problems, rather than simply perform tasks that AI can increasingly perform itself.

This means education must put greater emphasis on critical thinking, creativity, communication, judgement, curiosity and problem-solving. Knowing how to use AI effectively may become as fundamental to employability as knowing how to use a computer became a generation ago.

And this change cannot be restricted to engineering colleges. India needs doctors, teachers, lawyers, accountants, marketers, managers, entrepreneurs and civil servants who understand how to work effectively with increasingly capable AI.

India has already begun building the foundations. The IndiaAI Mission is investing in computing capacity, indigenous AI models, datasets, skills, startups and responsible AI. In July 2026, the Government said the mission had identified 762 AI use cases across 62 ministries, while 58 AI Centres of Excellence and 543 Data & AI Labs had been approved.

The direction is encouraging. But the scale of preparation must match the possible scale of transformation.

Is India preparing fast enough?

The question is not whether India should embrace AGI. It is whether India can prepare for it without allowing technology to outrun its institutions.

Three priorities stand out.

First, education and skills must move faster. AI literacy cannot remain the preserve of technology professionals.

Second, India needs strong digital and computing infrastructure and greater indigenous research capability. If AGI becomes a foundational technology, dependence on a handful of overseas systems could become a strategic vulnerability.

Third, India needs sensible rules for safety, privacy, accountability and responsible use. The more capable AI becomes, the less acceptable it will be to say, “the machine made the decision.”

The good news is that India is not starting from zero. The IndiaAI Mission includes dedicated pillars for FutureSkills and Safe & Trusted AI, while more than 26 lakh people have completed the YUVA AI for All programme.

The opportunity is to ensure that preparation extends beyond AI specialists to the wider population.

Beyond AGI: the ASI question

There is one further step, although it is much more speculative.

If AGI means Artificial General Intelligence, broadly human-level intelligence across a wide range of intellectual tasks, then Artificial Superintelligence, or ASI, would mean intelligence substantially beyond human capability across those tasks.

Google DeepMind is already examining the possible path from AGI to ASI. Elon Musk has made an even more dramatic prediction, saying AI could eventually surpass the combined intelligence of humanity.

These are possibilities, not established forecasts. ASI may be far away, or the path from AGI to ASI may prove much harder than its proponents imagine.

For India, however, AGI is the more immediate question.

India still has a choice

Nobody knows exactly when AGI will arrive, what form it will take or how quickly it will change the economy. But waiting for certainty would be a mistake.

The same technology that could disrupt jobs could democratise education, extend healthcare expertise, empower small businesses and accelerate scientific discovery.

India’s real AGI challenge may therefore not be to build the world’s most intelligent machine first. It may be to ensure that when increasingly intelligent machines arrive, India is ready to turn their intelligence into opportunity for its people.

The author is an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad and Professor of Practice at IILM University, Gurugram with an interest in AI, Technology and Strategy; Views presented are personal.