India tops global AI use as adoption surges across workforce - Nation Thailand
So India has apparently decided that the best way to leapfrog decades of infrastructure debt is to have every single worker become an unpaid AI prompt engineer. According to a survey highlighted in the Nation Thailand, a staggering 92% of Indian workers now 'use AI regularly' — a statistic so perfectly round and suspiciously high that it could only have been generated by an algorithm desperate to please its corporate sponsors. The PwC report accompanying this breathless adoption narrative projects AI could add $600 billion to the economy by 2035, which translates to about 6% of GDP. One can only imagine the PowerPoint decks currently circulating in Mumbai boardrooms, where 'productivity gains' are measured in hypothetical future dollars rather than actual wage growth or reduced working hours.
The truly delicious irony here is that this mass adoption is happening in a country where, according to the same article, 'AI has the potential to add US$550 billion to US$607 billion' — a range so precise it suggests someone ran the numbers through Claude Opus and asked for 'something that sounds sciencey but leaves room for plausible deniability when none of it materializes.' We've seen this movie before: the same consultancies that sold enterprises on digital transformation now pivot to AI transformation, complete with rosy projections that conveniently ignore the small matter of who actually captures the value. The gap between '92% use' and 'meaningful economic uplift' is precisely where the consulting fees live.
And let's not forget the delightful regulatory context: India, a nation still grappling with basic digital infrastructure gaps and data privacy frameworks that make the GDPR look like science fiction, is now betting its economic future on technology its own policymakers barely understand. The article breathlessly notes this adoption 'surges across workforce' without mentioning whether any of those workers have received actual training, or if they're just being told to 'figure out ChatGPT' while management counts the hypothetical billions. It's the digital equivalent of building skyscrapers on sand — impressive from a distance, until the first strong wind reveals the foundations were never there.