Nandan Nilekani

How do you ensure that AI benefits a country where nearly one in four people are illiterate? This is the kind of question being asked by Adbhut India, Nandan Nilekani’s latest project. Nilekani, the billionaire co-founder of Infosys, has spent fifteen years in and out of government developing digital public infrastructure for the world’s most populous country, earning him nicknames like “India's Bill Gates.”

And like many other tech billionaires, Nilekani, 69, is optimistic about AI’s potential, but has thoughts on how to ensure the technology’s rewards are distributed widely.

Adbhut India is a nonprofit collective aiming to create the public infrastructure to enable AI developers to meet India-specific needs. For example, Nilekani says interacting with AI through one’s voice could “dramatically improve access to services.” But these systems won’t help much if they don’t work in India’s many distinct languages and dialects, or lack an understanding of cultural context. Adbhut is developing datasets of Indic languages and India-specific benchmarks and use-cases. But the nonprofit’s white paper makes clear it’s not in the business of building products—those “are best created in a free market.”

Implementing disruptive technologies can come with significant risks, especially when done at a societal scale. Nilekani led India’s Aadhaar program, the world’s largest biometric identity card program. He promoted the program as a salve to welfare fraud, alongside a means to help improve tax collection, ease bank customer verification, among other benefits. However, civil society groups criticized Aadhaar for its lack of privacy and data security regulations and the system's unreliability in rural areas. More than 800 million Aadhaar records have leaked. And in 2017, after failures during the government's transition to the biometric cards reportedly led to over a million households losing access to ration programs across the country, at least a dozen legitimate welfare recipients died of starvation, activists told Reuters.

Nilekani declined to comment on these reports, responding in an email only that “Aadhaar has benefited over a billion Indians in many ways.” In the wake of these concerns, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the Aadhaar card would not be mandatory to obtain welfare benefits, and after the data breach, the government introduced a “masked” version of the card which limits the amount of identifiable information shared about its holder. Nilekani believes that ultimately the implementation of Aadhaar was a modernizing force in the country. “India's digital transformation began with Aadhaar,” he says. He remains similarly bullish about AI’s potential impact on the Indian workforce, especially in key industries like outsourcing. “Clearly, [AI] will lead to productivity improvement and automation, including in the area of customer service.” That boost in productivity, Nilekani thinks, will eventually outweigh job losses within the sector. For those who do lose their job to automation, Nilekani has a solution: retraining through programs like Infosys’s digital learning platform and other programs funded by his foundation.