By Puneet Asthana, Executive Director & CTO, Shriram Group’s Capital Market Businesses (Wealth, AMC & Broking)
There is a question that has crept into every boardroom and every technology roadmap across the world this year: Is Artificial Intelligence a threat to the world we have built, or the very catalyst that will take us further than we ever imagined? Walk into any technology conference in 2026, from the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi to the corridors of Silicon Valley and you will feel this tension in every handshake, every keynote, every hushed sidebar. CTOs are tearing up their old playbooks.
Governments are scrambling to write rules for a game that changes faster than the ink can dry. And millions of professionals are quietly asking themselves a question they never expected to face: Does my career have a future?
The honest answer is uncomfortable because the data pulls in both directions at once. Roughly 92 million jobs are expected to be displaced globally by the end of this decade. Around 30 percent of work hours across industries could be automated. Entire categories of work such as data entry, routine customer service, entry-level coding, and basic content production are being compressed in ways that would have been unthinkable just three years ago. And yet, in the same breath, 170 million new roles are projected to emerge, creating a net gain of 78 million jobs worldwide. Productivity in AI-exposed industries has nearly quadrupled since 2022. Jobs that demand AI skills now carry a 56 percent wage premium. The pie is not shrinking. It is being remade.
The threat side of this story is visceral and immediate. Cybersecurity professionals across the world rank AI-driven attacks like, deepfakes, automated phishing, voice cloning, as the single biggest danger they face this year. And the painful irony is that most organisations admit they are not ready for it. Only a small fraction feels genuinely prepared to manage the risks that generative AI introduces. Meanwhile, there is a quiet erosion happening beneath the surface and that is, the slow decay of critical thinking. When you can ask a machine to reason for you, the muscle that does the reasoning begins to weaken. It is no surprise that leading research firms now predict half of all global organizations will soon require “AI-free” assessments just to make sure their people can still think independently.
In India, the stakes feel personal. This is a country that produces 1.5 million engineering graduates every year. Yet in the last hiring cycle, major IT firms hired only 70,000 to 80,000 freshers, the lowest in over two decades. The stock market has noticed, and the Nifty IT index dropped more than 20 percent in February 2026 alone.
The model that powered Indian IT for a generation like large teams, labour arbitrage, offshore delivery is now being quietly dismantled by AI’s ability to do in hours, what once took weeks.
But here is where the story turns. India is not standing still. The technology industry is projected to reach $315 billion this fiscal year. The country now has 17 million active developers, growing at 28 percent year-on-year. Major IT firms are projecting billions in AI services revenue. Investments exceeding $200 billion have been announced for AI data centre infrastructure. The government has placed AI and data at the heart of its economic vision. This is not a country in retreat. This is a country reinventing itself.
The broader global picture mirrors this duality. Agentic AI is the tool and system that can plan, reason, and act autonomously and it is moving from the lab into production. Open standards for AI agent interoperability are beginning to take shape. Enterprises are shifting from individuals tinkering with chatbots to deploying AI systems that orchestrate entire business workflows.
As Gartner’s 2026 strategic predictions note, generative AI and agentic systems are creating the first genuine challenge to mainstream productivity tools in 35 years. A market shift of nearly $58 billion is already underway. The future of work will not be typed. It will be prompted.
So, is AI a threat or a catalyst? It is both. And that is not an alibi, it is the most important insight of this moment. The technology does not come with a moral compass. It amplifies whatever we point it at. Point it at healthcare, and it saves lives. Point it at education, and it democratizes knowledge. Point it at cybercrime, and it becomes the most dangerous weapon in a hacker’s arsenal.
The organisations that will define this era are not the ones with the biggest AI budgets. They are the ones that invest in people before platforms, that treat cybersecurity as a leadership priority rather than an IT afterthought, and that empower their employees to reimagine their own roles rather than simply waiting to be replaced. The real variable in 2026 is not the technology. It would be our courage, our choices, and our willingness to build something better than what came before.
The future is not something that happens to us. It is something we build.