Nandan Nilekani Calls for AI-Ready Small Businesses to Drive Job Creation
Infosys co-founder and former UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani called for an economy driven by millions of small businesses to boost employment, highlighting the need to make them resilient to artificial intelligence (AI).
Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026, Nilekani said job creation should come from millions of small companies rather than a handful of large enterprises.
“One of the legitimate concerns about AI is what happens to jobs,” he said, stressing the need to make small businesses “AI proof”.
Nilekani also highlighted the role of tokenisation and agentic AI in building an open, interoperable financial network. He said tokenised assets could provide trusted, transferable value, while agentic AI could generate demand and facilitate transactions.
He showcased three live pilots involving tokenised dairy assets for credit, warehouse receipts for loans and a marketplace for securitising assets.
Nilekani said the pilots shared a common architecture designed for high transaction volumes, interoperability, cybersecurity and quantum safety.
He emphasised that financial interoperability and liquidity would be essential to building a financial ecosystem where value moves as seamlessly as information.
