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India spending big on AI, but lacks talent to deploy it, says SBI chairman India spending big on AI, but lacks talent to deploy it, says SBI chairman

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Mumbai: As Indian companies ramp up spending on artificial intelligence (AI), a shortage of skilled talent to deploy AI solutions is emerging as one of the biggest challenges to the country’s adoption of the technology, State Bank of India (SBI) chairman C.S. Setty said on Wednesday.

“I think we need a large number of skilled manpower to deploy the AI itself. I think this is something what we are really facing in the market now, that while AI capital investments, everybody is ready for, the availability of the manpower to deploy these AI tools is actually becoming a challenge,” Setty said at the Citi India 2026 event.

His comments come amid growing concerns that rapid AI adoption could displace jobs and weaken India’s demographic advantage. Setty, however, said the bigger challenge is workforce adaptation rather than job destruction.

Setty also said automation has created a disconnect globally between capital investment and job creation, particularly in manufacturing. “The amount of capital invested and the jobs created always is a disconnect across the globe,” he said.

However, he expressed confidence that India’s services sector and engineering talent pool would help the country navigate the transition.

Job fears

Referring to concerns that AI could replace coding jobs, he said fears of widespread displacement may be overstated. “A lot of people said that in the tech IT job, for instance, the coding moving to AI, a lot of people will lose jobs. But in IT sector, 99% of the workforce are engineers. And these are the people who can be re-skilled in a short span of time,” he said.

Setty rejected suggestions that India had missed the AI opportunity, saying the country was well-positioned to emerge as one of the largest beneficiaries of the technology.

According to the chairman, only healthcare and manufacturing are the sectors that are already witnessing large-scale adoption of generative and agentic AI, largely aimed at boosting productivity.

On digital currencies, Setty said India’s policy focus remains centred on central bank digital currency (CBDC) rather than cryptocurrencies, though wider adoption would depend on identifying compelling use cases beyond payments.

“CBDC definitely requires some kind of repurposing in the sense that in a very mature payment ecosystem, CBDC positioning as a payment mechanism is not going to work,” he said.

With India’s digital payments infrastructure already highly developed, policymakers are exploring programmable CBDCs that can be used for targeted government transfers and other specific purposed. “For most of the direct benefit transfer, where a specific purpose is intended, CBDC can be effectively deployed,” he said

The current policy focus is on developing retail and wholesale CBDC frameworks, he added.

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