The progress of artificial intelligence (AI) is currently tilted towards speed and not trust or inclusion, Nikesh Arora, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks and formerly the President of Japanese investment company SoftBank, cautioned on Thursday.
“For us to enjoy the benefits of AI, we have to make sure we have to solve for inclusion, trust, and safety while we continue to make advances on AI. I would say at the current moment, the balance is tilted not in the favour of trust, inclusion, and security; it’s actually tilted in the favour of speed. You are seeing features and capabilities coming out as fast as they can, probably faster than we can absorb them,” Arora said on the penultimate day of the India AI Impact Summit.
Arora’s words were echoed by others, with inclusivity and safety being running themes of comments made by various global tech leaders. Vishal Sikka, founder and CEO of AI platform and products company Vianai and previously CEO of Infosys and Chief Technology Officer of SAP, listed safety, hallucinations, understanding the physical world and movements, and energy requirements as limitations of AI that are blocking its use in enterprises. As such, a “safe” AI had to be delivered: “we have done this with nuclear power for the last 80-plus years. We can and we must do this with AI”, Sikka said.
The warnings come at a time when newer and newer AI models and agents are being released across the world and are seen as threats to human employment. While experts say the use of AI can, in the long-term, create new types of employment, thousands of job cuts have been announced in recent times as more and more companies globally integrate AI and its applications in their processes. In an interview earlier this month, Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, said most, if not all, tasks in white-collar jobs will be automated by AI in the next 18 months or so. Microsoft itself announced thousands of layoffs over the last year or so, including around 9,000 in July 2025. Closer home, Tata Consultancy Services last year announced that it would let go of more than 12,000 employees as part of a restructuring exercise.
Arora of Palo Alto Networks, however, said it will take a long time for jobs to be replaced by AI agents.
“I was at Google in 2009 and I remember driving in the first iteration of a self-driving car. That was 16 years ago. So, it takes a long time to get one job replaced by an agent. So, all those of you who are really worried that our jobs are going to go away – it’s going to take a little longer than you think. We are not going to trust agents that easily and quickly,” Arora said.
Industry and products
The AI threat has cast a dark cloud over IT companies, including Indian ones, with their share prices taking a beating amid concerns over business orders and profits. On Thursday, Roshni Nadar, Chairperson of HCL Technologies, said India must transition from being a technology services provider to a country that builds intellectual property (IP) and leads innovation.
“Services scale with effort, IP scales infinitely. In the AI economy, value accrues to those who build and own platforms, models, and products, and not just those who deploy them,” Nadar said at the summit. This re-invention, she said, will create new industries and new professions for India.
Meanwhile, Vianai’s Sikka said being effective with AI required not only knowledge of it but also understanding its limitations and how they need to be overcome. “There is a huge gap between LLMs (Large Language Models) and business users inside enterprises and how to bring value to those users. And overcoming that gap is where a lot of value creating opportunity is.”
According to Rishad Premji, Wipro’s Executive Chairman, India’s advantage in the age of AI will come from developing talent. Premji said there are approximately 6.5 lakh professionals in India currently working in AI-related roles and this number would double by 2027. However, he argued India will have to go beyond training people to work with AI; what will be crucial will be applying AI with context, judgment, and the ability to adapt to change.
“That’s why AI fluency must extend beyond engineers to teachers, nurses, administrators, supervisors, small business owners, among everyone else. The dividing line will not be human versus machine; it will truly be between those who adapt and those who hesitate to adapt,” Premji said.
In the near term, Vinod Khosla of venture capital firm Khosla Ventures and co-founder of Sun Microsystems that was acquired by Oracle in 2010, said AI won’t have much of an impact unless it benefits the bottom half of the Indian population. According to Khosla, AI tutors, doctors, and agronomy experts for farmers offer a quick route to benefit Indians.
“These services should be part of the Aadhaar system. Aadhaar allowed us to offer UPI; there is no reason why we can’t offer on the same identity-based system where the hard work has already been done, within a year or two, to every Indian these services,” Khosla said.
Nikesh Arora. (Source: File) 
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