AI must serve India’s bottom half to create real impact: Vinod Khosla

Artificial intelligence (AI) can transform India within the next two years but only if it reaches the bottom half of the population, investor Vinod Khosla said at the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday.

“I’m going to talk to you about what can be done today, in the next year or two, reach a billion and a half people in this country with really impactful, immediate benefits,” Khosla said. “Unless AI benefits the bottom half of the Indian population, we’re not going to see a huge amount of impact.”

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Instead of focusing on future breakthroughs or corporate use cases, Khosla laid out three applications he said are deployable immediately: AI tutors, AI doctors and AI agronomists.

AI tutors for every child

“There’s a lot of children in India who don’t get much help in their education,” he said, noting that in parts of rural India, teachers “don’t often show up.”

AI-based personal tutors, he argued, can fill that gap. His wife runs the nonprofit CK-12, which offers free AI-driven learning tools. “About 400 million students have already used this service worldwide,” he said, adding that millions in India are already using it and that the platform is compatible with CBSE and national education standards.

The system can assess a student in 10-15 minutes and personalise lessons based on knowledge gaps. “I would venture to guess, a student learns better with AI than if they had a personal tutor,” he said.

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‘This is building a doctor’

Khosla was even more emphatic about healthcare.

“I’m going to talk to you about 24x7, almost free doctors available to everybody through AI. This is not helping a doctor. This is building a doctor,” he said.

Such AI systems, he argued, could provide primary care, chronic disease management, mental health therapy, nutrition and physical therapy guidance at near-zero cost. “Very little a human doctor can do that this AI can’t do today, other than the physical parts,” he said.

He proposed integrating AI tutors and doctors into India’s digital public infrastructure. “These services should be part of the Aadhaar system that allowed us to offer UPI,” he said, suggesting identity-linked access could scale them nationwide within “a year or two.”

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A ‘PhD-level agronomist’ for every farmer

The third pillar is agriculture.

“Every farmer should have an AI-level PhD available to them in their local dialect,” he said. Farmers would only need to “speak and look and take pictures,” without needing literacy.

Khosla argued that India cannot realistically scale its doctor-to-patient ratio to Western levels “even if you had a trillion dollars and decades to do this.” AI, he said, offers a shortcut and potentially a leapfrog moment.

“The future is here. Today,” he concluded. “Massive impact services — scale teaching, scale education, scale economy.”