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N. Chandrasekaran
N. Chandrasekaran
Chairman (Non-Executive), Tata Consumer Products Limited
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AI Is A Civilisation Shift; India IT Still In The Race: N Chandrasekaran | N18V

📅 Feb 18, 2026 CNBC-TV18 10 MIN 130065 VIEWS 13 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
'AI is a civilisation change. It will be a massive opportunity unlock. Enterprise AI is contextual. You can’t just throw IT companies out' TCS' N Chandrasekaran tells Shereen Bhan why he believes there will be latent demand to tap, and why India and IT services are in the race to win. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #NChandrasekaran #NChandra #India #IT #AILeadership #CNBCTV18Digital #CNBCTV18Digital
Interviewer 0:00 ↗
AI, the disruption it's going to cause, what it does to Indian IT services and so on and so forth. Let's get the elephant out of the room to start with and let's address that issue. The floor is all yours and I know everyone is waiting to hear from you on that. Straight.
N. Chandrasekaran 0:15 ↗
Straight. There is no question that AI is a fundamental technological change. So I have called it as a civilizational change. The way to look at AI is it's the next infrastructure change. If you go back in history, the steam engines was a big infrastructural change. Energy, electricity was an infrastructural change. Internet was an infrastructural change. AI is the infrastructural change of intelligence.
Interviewer 1:10 ↗
It is the infrastructure of intelligence. So whenever there is an infrastructure change that happens, always these questions arise.
N. Chandrasekaran 1:26 ↗
What does it mean? What is it going to change in the world? How do we adopt it? Will the world be the same? Will businesses exist? Who will get the lift? Who will go down? These questions have always existed whenever such a big fundamental infrastructural change happens. And AI is no different. But the point to learn from history is whenever an infrastructural change like this happens, it unlocks opportunities.
Interviewer 2:04 ↗
Steam engines made coal very efficient. So we should have used less coal. Actually, we start using more coal because there is a latent demand that gets created and that is never serviced. But the technology gives you that power to meet that latent demand.

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APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Chandrasekaran, N. (2026, February 18). AI Is A Civilisation Shift; India IT Still In The Race: N Chandrasekaran | N18V [Interview transcript]. CNBC-TV18. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1096313/

MLA

N. Chandrasekaran. "AI Is A Civilisation Shift; India IT Still In The Race: N Chandrasekaran | N18V." CNBC-TV18, 18 Feb. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1096313/.

BibTeX 
@misc{chandrasekaran2026_1096313,
  author       = {N. Chandrasekaran},
  title        = {AI Is A Civilisation Shift; India IT Still In The Race: N Chandrasekaran | N18V},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC-TV18. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {feb},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1096313/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}