Coding won’t be central to tech jobs in the AI era: Nilekani

Bengaluru: Artificial Intelligence is rewriting the grammar of software development, and writing code will no longer be the central role for technology professionals, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani said on Tuesday. AI, he noted, is being adopted faster than any previous technological transition—from the internet to smartphones—and is poised to fundamentally reshape how businesses operate.

“Talent will have to deal with a world where writing code will not be the goal. It’ll actually be making AI work—through orchestration and related capabilities,” Nilekani said at Infosys’ Investor Day. “Customer journeys, operating models, and mental models all have to change. Every enterprise must rethink how it operates.”

While traditional coding roles may decline, Nilekani said AI will create new categories of jobs, including AI engineers, forward-deployment engineers and forensic analysts—roles that barely existed a few years ago. He stressed that greenfield coding productivity is not the core challenge facing enterprises today. Instead, the real issue is managing trillions of dollars’ worth of legacy systems riddled with undocumented dependencies.

Highlighting the unprecedented speed of AI adoption, Nilekani said the internet took over a decade to reach a billion users, smartphones around five years, while AI is reaching similar scale in just a couple of years—helped by infrastructure built during earlier technology cycles. “Each technology transition has had implications, but this time it’s a fundamental change in how businesses operate. Customer journeys, operating models, talent—everything has to change,” he said.