New Delhi, March 2 -- In Indian boardrooms, 'AI-enabled' could overtake 'digital transformation' in its buzz quotient. If it's new, app-based and comes with a valuation expressible in unicorns, it must be good, right?

Well, India has always had a muscular pro-innovation bias. From UPI to ONDC, from Aadhaar to account aggregators, it has shown the world that technology can leapfrog infrastructure.

But history reminds us that progress occasionally has unintended consequences. The byproduct of a genuinely useful innovation can be harmful. Worse still, creators of successful digital technologies tend to gain an outsized influence over social behaviour. If a business's market cap rivals a state budget, it can subtly script culture.

In 1965,...