Sridhar Vembu, billionaire tech tycoon and Zoho Corp. co-founder, has brushed off ‘apocalyptic’ fears over artificial intelligence replacing human work, saying despite rapid advances in AI, customers fundamentally prefer to do business with people rather than machines.
Speaking to NDTV Profit at the India AI summit in New Delhi on Wednesday, Vembu said he believes AI and other digital tools can actually help create new jobs by enabling companies to get closer to their customers. In his view, Indian companies have a natural advantage on this front, as they tend to maintain deeper customer connections and can use AI to enhance that strength.
He emphasised that India must leverage its youthful population which is adopting AI faster than many parts of the world. This rapid adoption, he said, represents India’s real competitive edge in the global AI landscape.
On the question of which AI layer India should prioritise, Vembu noted that the country should eventually aim to participate across all layers of the AI stack. However, he acknowledged the practical limitations: India does not yet have access to the required GPUs, and the costs of building every layer are prohibitively high. As a developing economy, he said, India cannot afford to “throw money away” and must be judicious in choosing where to invest.
Discussing his efforts in Tenkasi, Tamil Nadu, Vembu revealed that his team is currently building smaller-scale processors. The goal is to develop custom logic that can be deployed in AI data centres. This approach, he explained, will help reduce power consumption and accelerate application development, creating more efficient AI infrastructure built from India for the world.
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