New Delhi, Oct. 14 -- The predominant question in the artificial intelligence (AI) debate, that of how many jobs it will destroy, matters but is not the most important. Some degree of labour displacement is inevitable, but we must understand where that will occur, how it will affect the structure of employment and whether we can design institutions that allow society to capture AI's productivity gains without letting its costs fall disproportionately on workers.

AI adoption is relatively slow and uneven, constrained by transition costs, organizational inertia, the need to redesign workflows and the difficulty of training systems on proprietary and incumbent data. In the US, business AI usage was only about 17-20% between December 2025 an...