16 Feb 2026 – AI Summit 2026: IT, BPO services will disappear in five years, says tech billionaire Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla warned that AI would wipe out most expertise-based professions, though it could democratise access to healthcare and education
Updated on: Feb 16, 2026 1:15 PM IST
By Shashank Mattoo, Hindustan Times, Washington

Tech billionaire and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has predicted that IT services and BPOs will “almost completely disappear” within five years due to artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Speaking to HT ahead of the India AI Summit, Khosla warned that AI would wipe out most expertise-based professions within 15 years, though it could democratise access to healthcare and education.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on October 28, 2024, in California. (Getty Images)
Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on October 28, 2024, in California. (Getty Images)

While acknowledging US-China dominance, Khosla backed India’s push for sovereign AI and criticised US President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

Edited excerpts:

You’ve had a long journey in Silicon Valley over the last 50 years from founding Sun Microsystems to leading your own venture capital firm. Tell us a bit about it.

Well, my dream the day I graduated from IIT was to do a startup of my own, because I heard about a Hungarian immigrant Andy Grove starting a company called Intel in Silicon Valley. I found my way to Silicon Valley and started my first company, which was also quite successful, but people don’t know about it. It went public, and then I started Sun Microsystems right after that, and I’ve been in the business of enabling entrepreneurs, helping entrepreneurs, assisting entrepreneurs my whole life, helping create large impactful companies and social impact. So that’s sort of been my area of interest in how I got where I did. It’s always trying to make things happen that you want to happen.

You first moved to America in the 1970s. You must have been one of the very few Indian entrepreneurs in tech and Silicon Valley, completely in contrast to what we see today. What was that like?

Well, the startup ecosystem back then in 1980 when I started my first company was very, very different. It wasn’t a 20 year old starting a company. It was establishment people starting companies because only they could get large amounts of funding to start a company. So my approach was very simple. Just do it. Don’t worry about the rules, the regulations, the biases, all that. Just ignore it and just go start a company, which is what I did, and I mostly just ignored everything else.

You’ve been writing about AI’s impact on the global economy for some time now. You’ve argued artificial intelligence is a revolution that is completely different to what we’ve seen in the past. Talk to us about that.

Well, previous changes like the internet and the smartphone revolution were really massive changes in platform technology, and each enabled a class of applications and uses and companies. So the internet enabled the class of companies like Google and Amazon. The mobile phone enabled the class of companies like Airbnb and DoorDash and Uber. AI is enabling a new class of companies. What’s interesting about AI is that previous technologies helped do various jobs. AI is creating human intelligence, where it’s very likely in the next five years, AI will be better than most humans at most things. There’s very little where humans will be substantially better. I’m not including areas like art and literature and song, and those will all be opportunity areas for humans. But in terms of economic functions, AI will be able to do that. So it’s a massive transformation of the US economy, but also the global economy. I think AI could cause a lot of productivity gain in the next five years.

What does the world economy, enabled by AI, look like in 10 to 15 years?

So very simply, the first step is almost all expertise will be an AI. And AI workers will be able to do accounting. They’ll do accounting better than accountants. An AI worker can be a physician, a doctor, an oncologist, a mental health therapist, a physical therapist. AI will be chip designers, architects and sales people. Now, before then, there’ll be AI workers who can work as a junior Assistant or an intern to a human architect or a human physician. The next wave of larger revolution coming is robotics. So most labor – it doesn’t matter whether it’s cleaning the dishes in your kitchen or working on an assembly line or working as a farm worker – robots will be doing those jobs, and I think they will take five years to mature. They’re about five years behind intellectual work or thinking work. The question is, what impact does it have for the economy? The biggest impact will be on jobs. But things will also be so much easier to do and so much cheaper to do, you know robotic labor will cost two or $3 an hour, not $20 an hour. So my bet is you will see reduced inflation and then a huge deflationary economy by 2035 globally.

Doesn’t that mean AI lead to a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite? Doesn’t mass loss of jobs also create space for political backlash and the rise of authoritarians?

It’s very clear that by the time somebody who’s 22 or 25 today is in their 40s, there will be a lot fewer jobs. And there’s no two ways about it in any comparative capitalist economy. Now there is good news and bad news. AI can make a doctor available to every Indian for almost no cost. AI can make a tutor available to every Indian child and adult for almost no cost. AI can make a lawyer available to every Indian so they can have their legal rights asserted, have access to the law. So there’s a lot of good things. AI can make entertainment almost free in a country like India, and these are all hugely deflationary kinds of efforts. Now the benefits of this need to be redistributed by the government. So redistribution is a bad word, but if there’s infinite production of goods and services, like medical care, like education, like transportation with self driving cars, then there aren’t jobs, but these services become essentially free, and governments will be able to provide a much higher minimum standard of living. Some of these services can be free if the Indian government does it by 2030 and so I’m looking forward to the India AI summit in February.

What does AI mean for a country like India which wants to create millions of jobs? Is its deployment politically sustainable if it causes major job losses?

Politics and policy will make a massive difference on how AI is deployed. There are countries who will slow that down. Germany is a classic example. But to your question, I think the focus on job creation may not be the right answer. The focus on education for the purpose of getting a job may not be the right answer, because AI will do it better. Now there will be a transition period where I would focus on when humans and AI are working together. In a decade and a half, India could become the largest exporter of AI based goods and services to the rest of the world, not IT services. IT and BPO services will disappear, almost certainly within the next five years. So the 250 million young people in India should be selling AI based products and services to the rest of the world, as they start to appear on the job market. I think that’s where the economic opportunity has to go. Almost no economist or business manager is thinking about it. It’s a huge danger, and we can’t ignore it.

Is there a chance that AI also allows America and China to corner the benefits of this new technology at the expense of India and the rest of the world?

I think that’s a real danger, and it would be bad if that technology was very narrowly focused on two countries and coming from two countries. India does have sufficient talent to develop these technologies. Today’s model of AI is very focused on large language models. I don’t think that’s the final chapter. Other models of AI are possible and will start to appear in the next few years, and India can get ahead of the curve. So developing AI is a harder question, but I do think India should try and win that race. Then there’s the question of applying AI. For example, you can build a Flipkart on somebody else’s internet. There will be applications of AI that India should absolutely have a serious effort on. I’m very interested in this, because we have a company called Sarvam building an Indian AI model. Countries have to have sovereign models, definitely for national defense, but also for other purposes. I would summarise by saying everything is up for grabs. None of the older assumptions will hold in 10 years. That has serious implications. Look, China was well ahead of the curve about four or five years ago, when they adapted their last five year plan. They made winning in AI as an objective of the five year plan, and they are executing on it. India should be thinking in the same terms.

A question about politics since you are a major political donor. A lot of Indians feel less welcome in America partly due to more restrictive policies towards professionals and students. Has America changed?

America goes through waves. In the 1970s and 1980s, when I first came here, you were still a foreigner, and you heard all the stories of bias against foreigners and others. But then it went through a phase in the 1990s and early 2000s where immigrants were accepted. There was such a large frequency of Indian doctors, engineers, CEOs and big companies. But the left in the US, carried the idea of diversity, equity and inclusion way too far to extreme levels. I think they did a lot of damage. I’m an independent, not a Democrat. I used to be a Republican, but I believe climate is a big enough issue over which I became an independent. I don’t have left or right politics. I tend to be in the middle. I think the left did so much damage and continues to take that approach. Mamdani is a good example in New York. But I think the backlash that caused Trump’s ascendance will go away. I don’t think it’ll last for very long. He’s the unnatural person who lies and cheats and will do anything. I would not have imagined anybody threatening to invade Greenland. But that too will pass. I think you’ll see a backlash and more movement towards the middle.

We’ve also seen restrictions on H1B visas with the rationale that foreign professionals are taking American jobs. Your view?

This is a very silly, naive understanding of what really happens and how value creation and innovation happens. Look, in the last 25 years in America, the percentage of GDP growth coming from innovation has been very large. I’ve seen estimates of 40% of all growth comes from innovation. And the innovation economy was driven by H1B visas. In the 1970s, we used to call it brain drain, from India to the US. I was guilty of that. Recently, you’ve seen people migrating back to India, and that’s good for India to have that expertise and knowledge brought back to India. This interchange is very healthy for the global economy, but Trump has stopped that. He doesn’t understand that it’s about creating jobs through the innovation economy. So I do think Trump’s policies are going to do long term damage. He’s mixed legal immigration with illegal immigrants, or immigration. Illegal immigration is not good for the country. Legal immigration is very good by contrast.