India’s chief economic adviser emphasizes the need for a security-focused approach to AI, warning against widening inequalities and highlighting the potential for technology to shape the country’s economic future amidst global challenges.
India must take a careful, security-first approach to artificial intelligence, especially in finance, the country’s chief economic adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran said on Friday, warning that the technology should never be allowed to become “a tool or a filter for exclusion”. Speaking at Assocham’s FinTech festival in New Delhi, Nageswaran said the immediate priority was to balance the gains from AI with safeguards that protect users and markets. He said AI can improve the assessment of borrowers’ creditworthiness and help spot default risks and signs of financial stress earlier, but only if institutions prevent the technology from widening access gaps.
His remarks echo a broader caution he has voiced in recent public appearances, where he has argued that AI should complement human work rather than replace it. According to reports from live events in 2026, Nageswaran has said the technology ought to raise the value of each worker by freeing people to focus on tasks better suited to human judgement, while businesses move beyond experimental pilots and into practical deployment.
Nageswaran also tied the AI debate to India’s wider economic outlook, saying the next 20 years could be tougher than the period that followed the 1991 reforms. He pointed to climate change, geopolitics, technology and the increasing use of capabilities as strategic weapons as major pressures that will shape the country’s path towards its 2047 development goal. In his view, both the public and private sectors will have to improve sharply if India is to sustain growth in a more hostile global environment.
That warning about exclusion has gained urgency as economists and policy makers debate how quickly AI could reshape hiring, skills and inequality. Live reports from other recent forums quoted Nageswaran as saying India must strengthen education, expand labour-intensive industries and prepare young workers for an AI-heavy economy, or risk losing the demographic dividend it hopes to turn into an advantage. He has also said it is still too early to measure AI’s full impact on India, arguing that the noise around the technology still outweighs the signal.
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