AI tutors, doctors for all via Aadhar in 1–2 years: Vinod Khosla

Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said India can deploy AI-powered personal tutors, primary-care doctors and agri advisors for 1.5 billion people within the next one to two years. He proposed that such services be integrated into the country’s Aadhaar stack.

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit, Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, said AI systems capable of delivering high-quality education and healthcare already exist and can be adapted for India at low cost. “Unless AI benefits the bottom half of the Indian population, we’re not going to see a huge amount of impact,” he said.

The Indian-American entrepreneur said these services should be rolled out through non-profits and integrated with the Aadhaar ecosystem, similar to how identity infrastructure enabled the rise of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). “Aadhaar allowed us to offer UPI. There’s no reason we can’t offer, on the same identity-based system where the hard work has already been done, these services to every Indian,” he said.


AI, according to him, can outperform human tutors by assessing a student’s proficiency in 10-15 minutes and identify gaps using techniques such as knowledge tracing. “This is not just a chatbot,” he said, adding that the system has been trained on billions of student questions.

He also said discussions are underway to build an AI version of Diksha, the government’s digital repository of education content, in collaboration with the Indian firm Sarvam AI.

Digital doctors

On healthcare, Khosla asserted that AI systems can deliver full-spectrum primary care, including disease management, mental health therapy, physical therapy and nutrition coaching at minimal or no cost.

“This is not helping a doctor. This is building a doctor,” he said, adding that beyond physical examination of a patient, there is little a human doctor can do today that AI cannot.

The AI physician, he said, would directly interact with patients, diagnose conditions, prescribe tests and recommend treatments, with triage protocols to escalate cases to human doctors when required.

Scaling up India’s doctor-to-patient ratio to Western levels through traditional means would not be feasible even with massive investment, according to him.

Use in farming

This would involve providing farmers with round-the-clock access to a “PhD-level agronomist” via voice and image interfaces, eliminating literacy barriers. The system would be localised for Indian languages and regional crop and disease conditions, he said.

“The future is here today. What needed hundreds of billions of dollars can be done very cheaply… If we don't do that, it is a massive opportunity loss for us,” Khosla said.