Co-Founder & Chairman, Infosys
Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani on his expectations from a post-COVID world
Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani spoke to India Today TV about the new normal during the pandemic and how much will remain the same in a post-COVID world. He stated that after the pandemic was over, life would become a hybrid of offline and online, schools and offices would reopen but there will still be a focus on digital. Watch the video for more.
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About Nandan Nilekani
Nandan Nilekani has been speaking publicly about the intersection of digital public infrastructure (DPI) and artificial intelligence, drawing on his experience as the founding chairman of UIDAI (Aadhaar) and co-founder of Infosys. At the 2026 Indiaspora Forum, he described how India’s DPI—including Aadhaar, UPI, and DigiLocker—has been built as open, interoperable public rails at population scale, and argued that the same approach can be applied to AI deployment. He cited an example of an AI application built in three weeks for Amul, a dairy cooperative, to help farmers monitor cattle health. Nilekani also expressed concern that without deliberate efforts to use AI for broad benefit, the technology could become “a race to the bottom” that hurts people. In other appearances, Nilekani discussed the challenges of succession planning at Infosys, noting that replacing a founder with a non-founder is “an order of magnitude more complicated” due to values and culture. He said the emergence of AI prompted questions about Infosys’s relevance, but argued that the company’s role is to help clients retain optionality among rapidly changing AI tools and to orchestrate enterprise context. He cautioned that implementing AI in a dysfunctional company could be counterproductive, and said that AI transformation offers an opportunity to reduce bureaucracy and silos. At the Raisina Dialogue, he stated that AI technology will become commoditized and that efforts to restrict its diffusion are unlikely to succeed, adding that “leadership will shift from company to company.”
Transcript (16 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:00
Hello and welcome to this India Today's special. Corona times have disrupted businesses and indeed the global economy. Joining us today is a very special guest. He's a non-executive chairman of Infosys, was the founding chairperson of our Aadhaar unique identity system. We're joined today by Nandan Nilekani. Appreciate your joining us, Mr. Nilekani. Let me first ask you, I hope that lockdown time is treating you and your family well.
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Nandan Nilekani0:34
We are safe in Bangalore. I've really watched out at home the last three months, but I think it's the kind of challenges other people are facing. I think we have much better.
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Interviewer0:48
That's good to know. Mr. Nilekani, let's come down to those challenges though of lockdown times. I want to start with the so-called great disruption that's taking place in businesses the world over. How has Corona in your view and the lockdown disrupted business models in general and the IT sector in particular?
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Nandan Nilekani1:09
Well, obviously it has had a huge impact on business because lockdown means people stay at home, people don't travel. So any business that depends on face-to-face interaction like a restaurant, a bar, a shop, a haircutting salon, or anything that involves travel or hospitality like airlines, hotels, have all got pretty badly hit in the last three months. And we are seeing the impact of that. On the other hand, there are businesses where you can work from home, which are not so much human interaction based but digital based, and those have done better because they don't really face the kind of disruption, provided they are able to provide connectivity to all their employees. Like at Infosys, 240,000 employees in 46 countries were able to work from home, 93 percent within a matter of weeks. So I think this has really been bipolar in that sense: companies that are face-to-face, human contact kind of businesses have been badly hit, whereas those that have a digital approach, probably including yours, have been less badly hit.
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Interviewer2:26
Mr. Nilekani, do you see in this crisis possibly an opportunity, particularly for those in the information technology and digital technology business using artificial intelligence, automation to try and recraft the businesses? Do you see that happening now much more in the future?
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Nandan Nilekani2:48
Oh, absolutely. I think this has brought the whole world into a new way of doing things. As you know, even the Indian Supreme Court is conducting all its cases over videoconferencing. Every business is looking at how to become more digital, how to make it contactless, how to deliver more services and products in a safe manner. So this is leading to a lot of rethinking of how business should be organized. And there's also a speed element: decisions that could have taken months and years are now being taken in weeks because of the situation. So I think this has a big impact and it's an opportunity for firms to help in this transformation.
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Interviewer3:34
So is this in a sense, Mr. Nilekani, going to be a new normal in the way businesses are done, that they will be increasingly done in the virtual online world, perhaps not face-to-face? We are already seeing this in education, in which you have invested a lot. But are we going to see an exponential growth possibly in online education and indeed across sectors as the new normal?
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Nandan Nilekani3:57
Well, I think the normal post-pandemic will be a hybrid where you will have a combination of digital delivery, but where person-to-person contact is required, you will have that. For example, I think when things get back to normal post-pandemic, virtual schooling will be back in schools, employees will be back in offices, but they will also combine that with digital delivery. So I think the current situation is not really the normal; it is what we're dealing with because of the pandemic. The new normal is going to be a combination of digital and physical, a hybrid model. And that will apply to education or any business, banking, whichever business it is, it's going to be a combination of both.
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Interviewer4:47
So are you, Mr. Nilekani, telling me that you're more optimistic than many others are? I've heard enough people say that this is the onset of a Great Depression, growth rates slowing down, service sector badly hit, lots of jobs being lost. Are you worried about the immediate future, or do you believe this is temporary and a year from now things will get better as people adjust to this new normal?
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Nandan Nilekani5:11
Obviously, it's a crisis that is unprecedented in the world. It affects every one of us, every individual, every business, every nation, every society. So obviously it's unprecedented in its scale and scope, and it is going to leave huge scars on businesses. Many people are going to be unemployed. We have seen the challenges of jobs. In many ways, this is going to be a setback to our efforts to eliminate poverty. So this is a big one. But within that, in some areas like IT, for example, IT has been relatively less affected for the reasons I mentioned. Of course, some of the customers of the IT companies are deeply affected, so that also has implications. But by and large, this sector is slightly more secluded from the overall situation. But overall, I think it's a pretty difficult situation, and you can expect negative growth of the economy all over the world. You are going to see recession, you're going to see a lot of job loss. All that is definitely there, and it's quite a big setback.
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Interviewer6:26
Do you then see, from what I can gather, Mr. Nilekani, that this is a moment to recraft businesses in a way, and in the way individuals also look at the future? I remember you pushed for years the idea of Digital India. We are now seeing countries like Singapore actually using this lockdown to push artificial intelligence, data analytics, sensors in the healthcare sector itself to make lives easier, safer, and smarter for their citizens. Do you see that happening more and more with more use of apps like Aarogya Setu? Is there a model there that India could embrace in the future?
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Nandan Nilekani7:04
Absolutely. It is going to be transformational, and this is the opportunity for us to look at all our activities in business or government and see how we can reimagine them in a post-pandemic world with this hybrid digital-physical model. And I think now there is also the appetite for doing that. I talked about how the Supreme Court is conducting all its hearings on video conferencing. There will be implementation of AI for machine translation of English to Indian languages and back. So I see greater acceptance of digitalization across the board in business, government, and society. So I do believe that while this is a terrible crisis, we will be able to perhaps accelerate the digital transformation of India to that extent.
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Interviewer7:58
Mr. Nilekani, do you think that the Modi government is on the right track pushing this idea of Digital India, of more and more transactions through apps, that the benefits of this perhaps could now be seen in the months and years ahead?
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Nandan Nilekani8:12
No, I think definitely this government has given a very high priority to digitalization. Digital India, as you know, was launched five years back on July 1st, 2015. And many of the things that we have today, the Aadhaar payment bridge, the DigiLocker which has literally billions of documents which are all paperless, the payment systems, all this has been possible because the government has put its weight behind digitalization. The GST system, which is a single tax system for the country, the FASTag system which allows you to pay tolls in a contact-free manner, you just drive through the toll gate and it deducts the money. All these things are thanks to the government creating national population-scale digital goods which are coming in handy in this crisis.
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Interviewer9:06
On the flip side, Mr. Nilekani, as we saw in the early weeks of the lockdown, the urban poor getting left out, many of them being forced to migrate back to their villages. Is there a concern that the digital divide in society could also widen in the times in which we live, that there will be greater inequality as people lose jobs, and bridging that will not be easy through just a Digital India concept?
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Nandan Nilekani9:33
No, I agree with you. I think anything that has so much of technology can lead to an inclusion bias. For example, online education does not mean anything to somebody who doesn't have a phone, and so on. So we have to be very sensitive to this and create solutions. For example, the way the government is thinking is not only will it be online on your device, but you also have it on the radio, on television, or you have worksheets that you can print at a neighborhood CSC. So there are thoughts about how to make it inclusive. One of the things that we could have done was really implement nationwide portability of benefits. We did that for cash, so the Aadhaar payment system is nationwide. I can withdraw money anywhere in the country. So if I'm a migrant either in the city or the village, I can withdraw money. But the previous system was not. I did a report in 2011 for creating a nationwide portable PDS system, but that was not implemented. And now they're implementing that one nation, one ration card kind of thing. So I think absolutely we have to be very, very sensitive to creating technologies that are highly portable, but where people have a choice, they can access it anywhere. And we have to be sensitive. For example, in payments, there is one model: you can use UPI for smartphone payments, you can use UPI for feature phone payments, which together cover about two-thirds of the country, and you can use other renewable payments for those who don't have a phone but have a bank account, which is much more common. So I think everything has to be designed so that it's universal in its access.