India AI Impact Summit 2026: ‘You’ll be redundant if…,’ Microsoft South Asia President explains how AI will change jobs

India AI Impact Summit 2026 | Puneet Chandok, President of Microsoft India and South Asia, on Monday said artificial intelligence (AI) will not kill jobs but ‘unbundle’ them. He, however, warned that those who fail to learn and adapt will become redundant.

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“AI will not kill jobs, AI will unbundle jobs,” he said while speaking at a session of the AI Impact Summit 2026. “Your job is a bundle of tasks. My job is a bundle of tasks. What AI will do is it’ll unbundle it. It’ll break it. All the transactional stuff that you do, stuff that feels like work. I sent 50 emails, and I updated three trackers, and I attended seven meetings. Feels like work. It’s not really work. AI will take that away.”

He said the shift places responsibility on workers to rebuild their roles around higher-value skills. “You and I need to bundle ourselves much better. And that’s why I say skilling will be the only oxygen mask. If you’re not learning AI today, if you’re not learning every day, that’s one thing I can tell you for sure. You’ll be redundant.”

Intelligence becomes abundant

Chandok described a world where companies no longer rely solely on hiring to solve problems; they can now buy intelligence. He said AI will change the way companies do business and hire people.  

“We’re all used to putting intelligence to work through people. If you have any problem, any project in your business, what do you do? You hire people. But with AI, you have the ability to buy intelligence. Imagine a world where intelligence moves from something which is scarce and expensive and hard to get to something which is abundant, something which is easy to work with.”

“If intelligence is available on tap, if unmetered intelligence is available to all of us, it will change everything about how we run businesses and how we run our country,” he said. 

Digital colleagues are coming in 

Chandok said the next big shift in artificial intelligence will be the arrival of “digital colleagues” – AI agents that function as teammates rather than tools. “We’re all used to physical colleagues working with us. We’re not used to digital colleagues,” he said. “The real unlock will happen when AI moves from being a tool on your phone or laptop to a true teammate.”

He argued that advances in AI agents – built on large models – are what will make the technology truly useful for businesses. Unlike traditional software, these agents combine perception, reasoning, and action. “They see everything you see. They have cognition. They have intelligence, and they have agency,” he said, adding that they can “act with your permission but not your involvement.”

According to the Microsoft executive, such capabilities will challenge the foundations of what he described as the “inefficiency economy” – sectors where revenues are tied to billable time rather than outcomes. “Trillion-dollar economies today are built on what I call the inefficiency economy,” he said. “Your lawyer makes more money when the case goes on longer. Your doctor makes more money when you’re sick for longer. Your IT services partner makes more money if the project runs longer.”

“That charade will end with AI because AI doesn’t bill hours – it gives you outputs,” he added, pointing out that if an AI system can draft a legal document in seconds, time-based billing models could come under pressure.