Co-Founder & Chairman, Infosys
Technology For Good - CSC Global Leadership Series with Nandan Nilekani Infosys Chairman
CSC Global Alumni in partnership with CSC India hosted the launch of the Global Leadership Series in India on the 2nd of February 2022.
Moderated by Balaji P, the Chair of CSC India special guest Chairman of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani, discusses the role of technology in society and how technology can be used for 'good' and the benefit of all in society.
CSC alumni from over 25 Commonwealth countries attended the event via video link.
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 (15 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Nandan Nilekani0:04
Number of things other things that I work on, which continue to be though I'm no longer in the government. I do help in these large-scale population-scale transformations.
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Interviewer0:14
Lovely. I'm glad you used that word because I was just about to say you introduced new terms like data-rich India, population scale impact, and now 'bitfulness' for that matter. And you obviously passionately argued about the role of IT and technology in solving large societal problems. You gave a couple of examples already. The question is: how do leaders of large digital companies and even for that matter government ensure that the march of technology doesn't widen the digital divide and that truly technology can be a force for good?
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Nandan Nilekani0:45
I think that's a very important question. As our lives have become more digitally dependent, and the pandemic showed that we did everything digitally—commerce, food, education, entertainment, relationships—not having access to technology is very important. India has been fortunate that it's done a tremendous job, thanks to all the great mobile companies we have, where connectivity has become ubiquitous over the last 10 years. Device prices are falling, but that's not enough. We have to make sure that everyone has access to a device, either their own or as part of a shared device, which can work in a village and stuff like that. Then I think governments and companies have to focus on technology that will actually make a difference to people's lives. How can we use this to improve their healthcare? How can we use this to improve their skills? How can we use this to improve the quality of learning? That's very important because if technology is just used to aimlessly watch videos and all that, then it will not really get to where we want. In fact, what we talk about in our book 'Bitfulness' is precisely that: how do we structure technology in a way that it is equitable, that it is inclusive, that it does not create winner-take-all models but allows competition to flourish and so on.
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Interviewer2:06
Thank you so much. I think that helps clarify one other important dimension. There's a lot of cynicism and also mistrust of big tech. There's talk about unintended consequences of looking at multiple data sets, all population scale, and therefore the unintended consequences coming from such interaction or use or otherwise. How can business leaders and how can government actually address such misgivings?
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Nandan Nilekani2:36
Well, I think these are definitely concerns. One is, of course, in architecting the system to ensure that it is competitive. For example, if you look at the payment revolution in India through UPI, it's designed in a way that banks participate and banks provide the robustness of regulatory support and oversight, while at the same time it allows different consumer-facing apps to participate. So we have PhonePe, Paytm, WhatsApp, Google—everybody participating. There's no one dominant player; they're all competing. Customers can choose, and customers are interoperable and portable. So part of it is how do we ensure tech is more like the mobile revolution? I can change my mobile number and go to another provider. So creating interoperable, portable systems is very important. Often in the digital world, you get walled gardens, you end up being captive in a system, so there's a big role of government and public policy to do that. There are moves on foot now across the world to address these concerns. But my work has actually been really how to use tech for social benefits. I've always felt that it's about how do we use it for its transformational capability, how do you do it at scale. How do you get a billion people to use it? Because my view is that there's a small delta improvement for one person multiplied by a billion people: that's a huge societal improvement. So it's all about small change at population scale.
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Interviewer4:10
No, brilliant. Thank you so much. I'm going to jump now to some more real-time questions. Actually, the chat box is full of them. I requested John to help us a little bit with sifting through the questions. There's one question which has come from Andrew Larpent. He's the chairman of Commonwealth Association for the Aging. And his question is: as the speed of technological innovation accelerates, how do we ensure that those sections of civil society, particularly the elderly, are not left further behind and marginalized in the digital world?
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Nandan Nilekani4:40
So I think that's a great question. I think we obviously have to make technology even simpler to use. In some sense, I think the pandemic accelerated even older people to use technology. Today, grandmothers talk to children over video because that's the only way they can talk to the grandchildren, since they're in two different cities. But it's also about enabling better interfaces, better UI, better voice recognition and all those things. So we have to work very hard to make it more and more accessible to older people.
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Interviewer5:18
Thanks. London, another interesting question from Peter Moore. In this fast-changing digital environment that you've described, what should the role of governments be in supporting the digital economy?
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Nandan Nilekani5:30
Well, the government has a huge role in enabling the digital economy. Partly, of course, one is creating the policy framework to enable many companies to participate in the market and produce goods and services. Have clear competition rules so there's competition and innovation all the time. And whenever required, produce the digital public goods that enable others to participate. In that sense, India has been a leader, whether it's with the Aadhaar platform, the UPI platform, the account aggregator platform which allows people to use data to get better credit, and many other examples. Some part of this public infrastructure has to be done by government, but it must be designed in a way which is open enough to allow private companies to build on top of that. So finding the balance between what should be in the government space and what should be in the market space is very important. And I suspect that's also evolving all the time depending upon the situation.
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Interviewer6:31
That's right. There's a question from Alpena Kera: with technology touching all parts of our lives, how do we see the status of cybersecurity measures and are we doing enough as a society or as a nation?
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Nandan Nilekani6:46
Well, I think cybersecurity is really going to be one of the challenges of our times. In some sense, we have accelerated making our systems open to the public. We have accelerated putting our systems on the internet for anyone to use. That has obviously encouraged a lot of bad actors, both state and non-state, to take advantage of that. Around the world, I think it's a very huge concern for firms and for governments. I don't think we can rest on this because every time we fix one particular loophole, somebody else opens another window of attack. So I think this is an ongoing thing. I agree completely that there should be very high clarity, because if you don't do that, then this whole thing will really have a huge backlash.
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Interviewer7:35
Makes a lot of sense. There's a question from Harish Natarajan: one undesirable downstream effect of work from home and hybrid offices is unemployment, especially in the unorganized sector—messengers, runners, office support staff, etc. Do you have any thoughts on how this segment can be reskilled to become more productive?
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Nandan Nilekani7:59
Well, I think hopefully, once we get back to some kind of post-pandemic equilibrium and as people go back to work, there'll be more of these proximity jobs which are currently being devastated—whether in office, restaurant, or travel. So that's something. But I think skilling is very important. In fact, I'm involved with some skilling initiatives in India, and the idea is how do you create platforms for upskilling people. How do we make sure that people are issued credentials saying that they have the necessary skills, which can be verified, and then how do employers discover people who have skills so that you can give them jobs? I think a lot of it is building these ecosystems that reduce friction and improve discovery, trust, and so on. That's some of the stuff that's going on right now.
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Interviewer8:52
Makes a lot of sense. I suspect some of the business models of hyperlocal delivery and so on might end up. In fact, we already are aware of this new initiative called ODC, the Open Network for Digital Commerce, and the idea is that we create an interoperable commerce network so everyone can participate. So if I want to buy something, I put up my request and maybe the neighborhood store can say 'I have that in stock and I can deliver that to you in 10 minutes.' So how do you make e-commerce more participative? That's also one of the big initiatives today in India.
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Nandan Nilekani9:26
Brilliant.