Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder and Chairman of IT services of Infosys, have warned against the hype over AI, pointing out that the implementation challenges are still the same. Nilekani believes that adoption of AI needs a lot of effort and workflow changes.

While addressing the Carnegie Global Tech Summit 2025 on Friday, Nilekani said the gap between global developments and AI adoption in India to be short.

He further emphasized the imperative to transform routines and processes of businesses and governments in order to successfully incorporate AI.

"Everybody is talking about AI, so the whole thing is much more hyperventilating, but fundamentally, the challenges of implementation are the same, like anywhere else, and we have to make sure habits change," Nilekani said.

 "You have to change the workflow in enterprises or in government, so that AI is part of it. we have to do a lot of upgradation, but the fundamentals still matter," he added.

Nilekani emphasized that AI adoption will not be easier and will require the same effort, if not more. "AI doesn't mean it's going to be easier to do. It's going to take the same effort, if not more effort," he said.

Despite the challenges, Nilekani believes that India's technological sophistication over the past 15 years will enable faster AI adoption. "Because of India's situation today and the technological sophistication that we have been able to accomplish in the last 15 years or so, it is going to be much faster," he stated.

Nilekani expects the gap between global developments and AI adoption in India to be short. "The gap between the global developments and AI in India is going to be very short, and this is because of the transformation that we have done in India," he added.

"One of the key differences between previous tech revolutions or advances has been, for the first time, we intend to place trust in non-human intelligence, or decision making. We didn't do that earlier, because earlier technology was deterministic, predictable," he said

"We also know that we are far more forgiving of human error, but much less forgiving of machine error. So now it's even harder in the enterprise in the consumer world, you can adopt AI scale, because somebody can land, launch a chat job chat bot which everybody uses. And once in a while, the chat bot hallucinates or makes a mistake. You're willing to live with it. You're willing to live with the fact that the consumer chat bot has occasional mistakes," he added.

Noting that the implemention of AI is really difficult and will take a longer time in public sectors, Nilekani stated, "So in general, enterprise, AI is much harder and will take a long time, but the most difficult actually, is implementing AI in the public sector, because public sector has structural constraints, it has ministries, it has departments."