AI has penetrated work. But is the workforce ready? That’s what a panel at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 discussed. The session titled The GenAI Talent Imperative: Building the Global Workforce was addressed by a number of experts from different sectors.
Commenting on the readiness to adopt AI, Indrani Choudhury of Microsoft said, “ Readiness is not just about reskilling or upskilling people. Its also about judging how to use AI, compliment with human judgement and for organisations, it is also about how individuals who are doing it are being trusted about the outcomes.”
Aligning with this, Jagdish Mitra, of Humanize, said, “Readiness means the speed at which you learn and the speed at which you have to imbibe knowledge is superfast. Also, the users have to be aware of what they are using. Otherwise, they would be using the same model for all the work, and there would be no difference left.”
But it is to be remembered that the summit is addressing not just India’s readiness for the adoption of AI but also its position to lead it globally.
Emily Bastedo, of ISACA, said, “I think India has come a long way, and it’s obviously evidenced by the fact that we are all here at the forefront of this discussion. And many governments are putting frameworks around this because we’re seeing the beginning of that. But, there is room for more than that.”
The session concluded with the elephant in the room, which is skillset and the ability to learn.
On this, Sanjeev Jain of Wipro, said, “Transformation keeps coming. I think it is important to have a workforce with high learning agility. Where you are actually given opportunities to learn to relearn to fail, and again relearn. We have to look at what will get disrupted with AI, what will come next, what will be created, and fourth is what will remain human. This will give rise to new jobs. The role of prompt engineering has come up already. We just have to build the mindset to learn and develop a new skillset, which is changing. Skillset is the new currency and needs to be continuously refreshed.”
