Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla on Thursday outlined an ambitious roadmap to provide AI-powered tutors, doctors and agronomy experts to Indians in the next couple of years, proposing that these public services be embedded within the Aadhaar ecosystem.
Speaking at a session of the AI Impact Summit in the national capital, Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures, proposed the creation of a non-profit company to build and operate these AI systems before transferring them into the Aadhaar ecosystem, alongside a Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-like service layer.
"Aadhaar allowed us to offer UPI. There's no reason 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," he said.
Khosla emphasised that the country must focus on applications that directly benefit "the bottom half of the population," arguing that only then would AI deliver transformative national impact.
"I am going to talk to you about some applications of AI that should be done immediately. What can be done today, in the next year or two, to reach a billion and a half people in this country with really impactful, immediate benefits," he asserted.
Making a presentation, Khosla began with education, observing that AI-based personal tutors are not futuristic concepts but already in use by millions of students.
"The AI tutors I'm talking about are far superior to human tutors," he asserted, explaining that they can dynamically identify what a student does not know and customise lessons accordingly.
Khosla added that such AI systems could dramatically enhance the utility of the government's DIKSHA platform by organising and personalising its vast content library.
Turning to healthcare, he proposed AI-driven primary care systems available round the clock to every Indian at "almost trivial or no cost." He said such systems could provide full primary care expertise, chronic disease management, mental health therapy, physical therapy, and nutrition coaching -- areas where demand in India is rising sharply.
"These will make available 24/7 to every Indian full primary care expertise," he said, arguing that AI could multiply India's limited doctor resources.
The third pillar of his proposal focused on agriculture, where he called for providing every farmer, including those with small landholdings, access to a "PhD-level agronomist" via AI, available round-the-clock.
"Today, these massive impact services that could be done with hundreds of millions dollars can be done very, very cheaply, scale medicine, scale teaching, scale education, scale agronomy, and these services impact the bottom half of the population more, and they need it more than almost anybody else. That's exciting. If we don't do that, it is a massive opportunity loss for us," he said.
PTI