Talent in the AI Age, From Code Coolies to Core Engineers
For decades, India’s most talented engineers served like coolies for American corporations. Many were sent on H-1B visas to handle the work few others wanted: maintaining aging systems, cleaning up bloated codebases, migrating databases at odd hours, and keeping global enterprises running in the background. The arrangement generated prosperity and foreign exchange, and it built formidable Indian IT giants. Yet it also meant that too much of India’s technical talent was confined to sustaining other nations’ systems instead of building its own.
Engineers were treated as low-cost labour rather than as co-creators of intellectual property—and then disparaged for supposedly taking American jobs. The trade-off was accepted because it delivered growth; it also postponed a deeper transformation.
Artificial Intelligence is now forcing a reckoning, because the playing field has shifted, and for the first time in centuries, India has the tools to build its own future rather than serve someone else’s.
The Blessing in Disguise
At the recent India AI Impact Summit, V Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras, called AI disruption a blessing in disguise for core engineers. He argued that India has invested heavily in training mechanical, civil, electrical, and biotech engineers, only to see them drift into generic IT roles because that’s where the jobs and money were—a misallocation of national resources.
As AI automates coding, testing, documentation, and maintenance, that door closes. Core engineers will have stronger incentives to remain in their disciplines, reskill with AI, and apply it to real problems in infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, and medicine—precisely where India needs them.
They did not spend years mastering thermodynamics, structural mechanics, or bioengineering to waste their lives maintaining legacy systems. The move into IT services was often driven by opportunity and economic reality, not by a lack of ambition. AI now creates the opportunity to apply their skills to work that serves a broader purpose and demands deeper expertise.
It opens the door to projects that are more creative, more technically rigorous, and more consequential. It allows engineers to return to deep science without becoming peripheral, turning computation into a powerful multiplier of their domain knowledge rather than a substitute for it.
A Glimpse of What’s Possible
I work with Kamakoti’s engineers through Vionix Biosciences, where IIT Madras teams are building the plasma physics and spectroscopy hardware for my company that has the potential to impact billions of lives. What stands out is not just their ambition, but their hunger—and their values.
These engineers want to invent, not maintain; to build systems that matter, not service ones that already exist. They do this on modest university salaries, a fraction of what they could earn in the IT industry. They choose it because they want to solve real scientific problems and create technologies that improve lives on a large scale.
These values and that hunger are India’s real edge. They align directly with Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw’s New Delhi Frontier AI Commitments unveiled at the summit, which emphasises deploying frontier AI for the public good. The framework moves the focus away from raw scale, benchmarks, and speculative valuation and toward measurable impact, inclusion, and responsibility. It calls for embedding intelligence into the systems that shape everyday life—healthcare, agriculture, infrastructure, and education—so that AI strengthens society rather than merely inflating market capitalisations.
AI as Infrastructure
That shift, however, only works if AI is treated as necessary infrastructure rather than hype, as a tool for strengthening society rather than a vehicle for greed and short-term profit.
That is because AI is like electricity, an enabler. On its own, it is neither good nor bad. Electricity transformed the world by lighting cities, powering factories, electrifying transportation, enabling modern healthcare, and shrinking distances through communication. AI can do the same.
When embedded into real systems and fused with deep engineering—in healthcare, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture—it can unlock capabilities that were previously out of reach. Used wisely, it enlarges what societies are capable of.
India’s Unique Position
India has all the necessary ingredients to make that happen: strong engineering institutions, deep mathematical talent, and massive-scale challenges in healthcare, environment, and infrastructure that few countries confront simultaneously. These are daily constraints on growth and quality of life. Addressing them requires engineers grounded in the fundamentals of physics, biology, and systems design, who use AI to deepen their expertise rather than replace it.
Why is India so important in the AI race? Because elsewhere, the incentives are skewed. In Silicon Valley, AI is increasingly about money—pouring billions into ever-larger models chasing marginal gains, benchmarks, and valuations. In China, AI is closely tied to surveillance systems, social credit architectures, and military applications. Neither trajectory will uplift humanity.
India can solve real problems that affect billions. By fusing frontier AI with deep engineering and grounding it in inclusive governance and public-purpose applications, it can embed intelligence into healthcare diagnostics at population scale, climate-resilient infrastructure, agricultural systems, water management, and energy grids. Done right, it can help tackle challenges for all of humanity, not just optimise the margins of a few.
The Reset
Both V Kamakoti and Ashwini Vaishnaw argue that this moment must be seized. AI disruption is not a threat but a reset. It can move India from being the world’s maintenancer to becoming one of its principal builders.
The engineers who once maintained legacy systems in distant data centres can now design the systems that will power India’s future. The talent that was exported can now be deployed at home. The skills that were used to serve others can now be used to serve our own people.
This is not just an economic opportunity; it is a national imperative. India’s demographic dividend, its engineering talent, its scale of challenges—all point to a unique role in the AI age. The question is whether we will seize it.
Q&A: Unpacking India’s AI Talent Opportunity
Q1: What does the article mean by “code coolies” and how has India’s engineering talent been historically used?
The term refers to how India’s most talented engineers were often deployed on H-1B visas to handle low-value maintenance work for American corporations—maintaining aging systems, cleaning codebases, migrating databases. They were treated as low-cost labour rather than co-creators of intellectual property. While this generated prosperity and built IT giants, it confined Indian talent to sustaining others’ systems rather than building India’s own.
Q2: Why is AI disruption called a “blessing in disguise” for core engineers?
As AI automates routine coding, testing, and maintenance, the traditional IT services pathway closes. This creates stronger incentives for mechanical, civil, electrical, and biotech engineers to remain in their core disciplines, reskill with AI, and apply it to real problems in infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, and medicine—precisely where India needs them. It allows engineers to return to deep science and consequential work.
Q3: What example does the article give of this new approach working?
The author works with IIT Madras teams through Vionix Biosciences, where engineers are building plasma physics and spectroscopy hardware with potential to impact billions of lives. These engineers choose to work on modest university salaries because they want to invent, solve real scientific problems, and create technologies that improve lives—demonstrating the hunger and values that are India’s real edge.
Q4: How does AI differ in its application between Silicon Valley, China, and what India could do?
In Silicon Valley, AI is increasingly about money—billions poured into larger models chasing marginal gains and valuations. In China, AI is tied to surveillance, social credit systems, and military applications. India, by contrast, can solve real problems affecting billions by fusing frontier AI with deep engineering and grounding it in inclusive governance—applying it to healthcare, climate-resilient infrastructure, agriculture, water management, and energy grids.
Q5: What is needed for India to realise this vision?
AI must be treated as necessary infrastructure rather than hype—a tool for strengthening society rather than short-term profit. India has the ingredients: strong engineering institutions, deep mathematical talent, and massive-scale challenges. What’s needed is sustained commitment to deploying AI for public good, embedding it into real systems, and ensuring engineers apply it to deepen their expertise rather than replace it. AI disruption is not a threat but a reset.
