Why Jayant Chaudhary sees AI as India's open door, not its threat

When India hosted the world at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February 2026, the headline was not profit or processing power. It was possibility. In conversation with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, Shri Jayant Chaudhary, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and Minister of State for Education, made a clear-eyed case. For a young, aspirational country, artificial intelligence is far less a disruption to fear than a door swinging open.

When Shradha asked him to choose between threat and opportunity, he did not hesitate. "Not a threat, but a huge opportunity," he said. "Hopefully the bark is worse than the bite."

The barrier that just fell

For the Minister, the real story of AI in India is who it lets in. The technology that unsettles incumbents is the same one that frees challengers. "For a status quoist who doesn't want change, AI could be a threat," he said. "But for someone aspiring to break into that fold, there is a beauty. Now you don't need to be a coder to think of a product."

That is the shift he keeps returning to, the value of an idea over the constraints of the market. "The capacity of an individual to scale up depends on the beauty of the idea rather than the capital constraint," he said. For a country carrying both a vast demographic dividend and real developmental deficits, that collapse in barriers to entry is precisely what is needed. In the Indian context, he added, AI is not disruption. "For our case, it is more a re-imagination." Jobs that are not possible today will become possible tomorrow, from data annotation to roles that do not yet have names.

From SIA to your WhatsApp

The Ministry's most visible bet is a conversational one. The Skill India Assistant, or SIA, began as a pilot and was among the first government Digital Public Infrastructure platforms to fold in an AI chatbot, hosted on the Skill India Digital Hub. It is built on Meta's open-source Llama models and implemented by the Bengaluru startup Sarvam AI. The reason for choosing Meta was reach. "They have a lot of presence at the grassroots in India. They understand the thinking of younger people," Chaudhary said.

What started as an experiment has grown teeth. SIA now works on WhatsApp, is voice-enabled and runs in 13 languages. Ask a question in your own style and you get an answer in that same style. It surfaces the country's sprawling skilling landscape, the more than 800 courses, certifications, NSQF alignments and academic credits that young people often never knew existed. The Minister is candid that it is still a work in progress. "Right now it's not perfect. The more the user base grows, the more those things will become perfect." He points to where things are heading by citing the private sector. At Bajaj Finance, he noted, nearly half of customer conversations on loans, insurance and banking are already handled by an AI chatbot rather than a person.

Teaching the country to think

Skilling, in Chaudhary's telling, starts well before the workforce. He pointed to CBSE's new curriculum on computational thinking and artificial intelligence for classes 3 to 8, launched on 1 April 2026 and rolling out from the 2026-27 session. The idea is to teach children to break a complex problem into smaller ones. "Sometimes children come up with the right answer. They just don't know how they came up with it," he said. He is insistent that India build its own scientific temperament without erasing identity, especially in its villages. The country, he argued, must stop aping models that do not fit and build AI that is regional and authentic in its reasoning.

The optimism comes with a caveat. AI and automation together will squeeze the entry-level and informal jobs that millions migrate to cities to find. "For people who are not skilled, who are in the informal economy, that entry-level job nature is going to change, and for that they need to embrace AI," he said. A widely cited World Economic Forum estimate hangs over the conversation, that roughly 65% of children in primary school today may end up in jobs that do not currently exist.

What matters more, a degree or a skill

When Shradha asked about a degree versus a skill, the Minister flipped the question to her. She answered for both of them, "a degree built on skills," and he liked it enough to repeat it. The most underrated skill for the AI era, he said, was understanding the social sciences, and he added psychology and storytelling. On language, his answer was both. "You are learning AI so you can tell your story to the world," he said, so an international language matters, but the mother tongue endures. "The language you speak is a part of you, but it doesn't define you. Your thoughts are what will define you."

Pressed on what success looks like in five years, Chaudhary offered an image rather than a metric. Today, MPs and MLAs write to him seeking admissions to Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas. He wants that same queue to form outside the country's ITIs, with skilling treated as aspirational, not as a fallback. His closing note to young Indians was a coach's, not a bureaucrat's. "Live with your head held high. Positivity is paramount. And making mistakes is not a sin," he said. The real skill is resilience. "The branch you're sitting on today may or may not hold tomorrow. So you must constantly have the capacity to land on your feet, then rebuild again, reinvent yourself."

In an age where the jobs of the future are still being invented, that may be the most future-proof skill of all.