Anupam Mittal Warns Against AI Hype Without Ground Reality
- Anupam Mittal warns that India’s push for AI ignores the ground reality of low formal employment and limited skilling infrastructure.
- He emphasizes that most Indian workers are self-employed and lack access to real-time upskilling, unlike developed nations.
- Mittal urges India to balance deep-tech ambitions with job creation to protect livelihoods and ensure inclusive growth.
Shaadi.com Founder and Shark Tank India judge Anupam Mittal has sparked a crucial debate around India’s artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions, urging policymakers and technocrats to take a more balanced, inclusive approach. In a candid LinkedIn post, Mittal criticized the country’s growing obsession with deep-tech narratives that often ignore the on-ground employment and skilling challenges faced by millions of Indians.
Mittal’s post, which quickly gained traction, featured a photo of an elderly woman wearing a Blinkit delivery jacket with a satirical caption: “Maybe she should learn Python. Perhaps she can fine-tune an LLM too, while delivering your groceries”. The image, paired with his remarks, underlined the stark disconnect between elite tech discourse and the lived experiences of India’s gig economy workers.
Taking a direct stance, Mittal cautioned against blindly mimicking Western AI strategies. “Every time I say India needs jobs along with deep-tech, someone sends me a whitepaper on AI skilling basically parroting the West without understanding our own reality”, he wrote.
While acknowledging that AI-driven automation is transforming major global companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Google where 40–50% of workflows are expected to be AI-powered in a few years Mittal argued that such comparisons don’t fit India’s current context. “Those are economies with smaller populations, higher formal employment, and robust reskilling budgets”, he noted.
Reflecting on his experience working in the U.S., Mittal highlighted that new technology rollouts were often met with real-time, organization-wide upskilling something India currently lacks. “India is not there yet”, he emphasized, pointing out that a large share of the workforce remains self-employed and outside the formal skilling framework.
Mittal credited the gig economy for playing a critical role in generating employment at scale in India, a country that holds nearly 20% of the world’s population. However, he warned that overemphasizing deep-tech solutions without a simultaneous focus on job creation and accessible skilling could put the livelihoods of millions at risk.
“We have highly-skilled, super-talented folks who will build the future of big tech from India”, Mittal said. “But we also have a large low-skilled populace that needs to be taken along”.
His closing message was clear: India must balance its ambition to lead in AI innovation with the pressing need to create inclusive employment pathways. “India needs to address both these issues simultaneously, no?” he asked, inviting wider reflection and dialogue.
