AI Summit: In AI, the race to the bottom is faster than the race to the top, says Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani

Speaking at a panel discussion on the fourth day of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 with Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic

Stakeholders across the board have to work extremely hard to show profound use cases of artificial intelligence, Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of IT major Infosys, said on February 19.

Speaking at a panel discussion on the fourth day of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 with Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic, Nilekani said all stakeholders must ensure AI diffusion happens correctly.

“Right now in AI, there's a race to the top and a race to the bottom, and the race to the bottom is faster than the race to the top,” Nilekani said.

“So, all of us, who have a stake in AI being useful to humanity, have to accelerate and redouble our efforts to make the diffusion happen. Otherwise, the consequences are going to be very difficult. There is going to be a backlash.”

While everybody agrees AI is like a general purpose technology, efforts should be around starting from the user and solving their problems. For instance, how AI and technology can take a billion people and give them better health care and the like.

“One has to start from there and then figure out how to make it happen. It won’t happen just with technology. Technology is just one piece of the puzzle. It's about institutions. It's about trust building. It's about negotiations. It's about guardrails, working with different stakeholders and making them go towards a common vision. Diffusion is difficult,” Nilekani said.

India, given its experience of diffusion at population scale, thanks to UPI, Aadhar and in all the various areas, should lead the way. We can build a pathway, or multiple pathways, to that goal, and that will show the world, as per Nilekani.

“If the only thing that AI does is create deep fakes or raise the price of your power bill, or all the other things that are happening, people are going to respond,” he said.

“The resentment of the blue collar workers led to the train wreck of globalisation. The resentment of the white collar workers is going to lead to the train wreck of AI,” Nilekani concluded.