IT services will vanish by 2030: Vinod Khosla

NEW DELHI: Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures, on Tuesday warned that India's IT services industry will cease to exist in its current form by 2030 as AI reshapes global services, while predicting that artificial general intelligence could arrive within two years.

"It's clear that people in India don't believe that the whole idea of IT services will go away. By 2030, there will be no such thing as IT services. There will be no such thing as BPO. Those are gone," Khosla said at the AI Impact Summit.

He argued that new AI-native services would replace traditional outsourcing models. "There will be new kinds of services based on AI that Indian companies can form and bring to the rest of the world because India has the best engineers, talent, and education. So, there are opportunities, but those will be very, very disruptive to the Indian economy."

Khosla also made a case for AI-led transformation in healthcare. Recalling his early thinking on the subject, he said he had concluded as far back as 2008 that scaling human doctors alone would not solve access gaps. "If I personally had a trillion dollars and 30 years, I could not get the doctor-patient ratio the same in India as it is in the US," he said. "That's why in 2008, I decided the only solution was an AI doctor."

He estimated that delivering daily primary care to 700 million Indians could cost "less than a billion dollars or $2 billion a year", calling it a small fraction of national health expenditure.

More broadly, Khosla added the adoption of AI would be shaped less by technological capability and more by politics. "The biggest issue to be managed very, very carefully is politics. Politics, not technical capability, will be the key determinant of what is adopted and what's not adopted."

Looking further ahead, he suggested work itself may become optional. "By 2050, it will be very clear that nobody needs jobs because enough production of goods and services will be near free," he said, arguing people would pursue passions rather than employment.