India AI Impact Summit 2026: ‘AI won’t cut healthcare jobs,’ Stanford professor says it could create 150 million roles

India AI Impact Summit 2026 | A Stanford University professor has said artificial intelligence (AI) could expand – rather than shrink – healthcare employment in India, potentially creating over 150 million jobs as services move closer to communities.

Dr Anurag Mairal, Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Stanford, argued that AI in healthcare is less about replacing doctors and more about redesigning how care is delivered, especially in countries where billions still lack meaningful access to healthcare.

“There are over 8 billion people in the world, out of which 5 billion people do not have meaningful access to healthcare. We have become more and more a sick-care model, where tertiary care institutions like AIIMS and Stanford hospitals are the ones providing care to most of our people. Where are most of the people? They’re in the homes and communities and villages, smaller towns and cities,” he said during a panel discussion at the AI India Impact Summit 2026.

The challenge, he added, is to move care closer to where patients live and make it affordable. “There’s a need for the health care or health system to be reimagined, bringing it closer to people. The cost of care is going to continue to go up if we stay with the sick-care model. If you want India to be a Viksit Bharat by 2047, they need to make sure that they are able to keep their populations healthy and productive at a cost in a cost-effective way.”

Technology, he said, is central to that shift.

AI as a job creator

Rather than eliminating workers, Mairal argued that healthcare may require far more personnel as services expand into smaller towns and homes. “We often think of AI or any technological tool as taking away jobs. In the US, 15% of the population is involved with healthcare one way or another. If you translate that number to India, you’re talking about 150 million-plus jobs. Because you have 1.4 billion people whose health needs to be cared for, you need a lot of people who will provide care as our population ages. And as our healthcare moves closer and closer to smaller towns, cities, and villages, we need more people. But how are you going to do that? The one way you can do that is by enabling them through technology,” he said.

He pointed to entirely new roles that could emerge as AI-supported care models expand, including care navigators for high-risk patients. “Those jobs don’t exist today. So you, in fact, are going to create new kinds of jobs and a good number of students will likely be doing those jobs.”

“The way I think about AI in healthcare and other use cases, too – I suspect this might be the case in other industries – that AI will actually net net create jobs,” Mairal said. He added that India should not aim to catch up in AI-enabled healthcare but leapfrog it. “That’s what India should be aiming for.”

Asked what he is hearing from fresh tech graduates coming out of universities, the professor said it’s challenging for them because “folks are not ready.” 

“When a technology wave hits, they’re not ready for it and then they quickly try to pivot – and our academic institutions, mine included even though Stanford is the hub of technology innovation and we have a lot of professors and students are involved in it – honestly we are not doing as good a job as we should in preparing this next generation for the kinds of jobs that are coming,” he said. 

“They are concerned, but they’re also excited. The youngest population graduating today feels a lot more excited about AI technology and feels they could do something with it. But our generation has to show them the path. We have to show them how these tools could potentially be useful for creating more productivity, more impact, more outcomes at a lower cost.”