Impact of AI on Employment, Skilling & Workforce Transformation

The use of AI across industries is fundamentally reshaping the global employment landscape, creating both unprecedented opportunities and significant disruptions to traditional work patterns. While AI has the potential to augment human capabilities, enhance productivity, and create new categories of employment, its rapid deployment has raised concerns about job displacement, skills obsolescence, and widening inequalities between those who can adapt to AI-enabled work environments and those who cannot. The challenge is particularly acute in developing economies that lack access to the skilling/reskilling infrastructure needed for workforce transition.

Current approaches to managing AI's impact on work remain fragmented, with limited coordination between stakeholders and insufficient focus on ensuring equitable access to future skills. The lack of globally recognized AI literacy and skilling programs, comprehensive frameworks for workforce transition, and sufficient investment in reskilling, combined with the growing “AI divide”, threatens to exacerbate existing socio-economic disparities and leave entire communities behind in the AI transformation.

The Human Capital Chakra envisages addressing these challenges by developing global frameworks/mechanisms/platforms for equitable AI literacy and skills development, enabling workforce transition, and establishing mechanisms that ensure the benefits of AI-driven productivity gains are shared broadly across society. This chakra is anchored in the principle that technological advancement must enhance rather than undermine human potential, ensuring that AI becomes a tool for inclusive economic growth and social mobility rather than a source of division and displacement. Inclusion for Social Empowerment

The current AI development landscape is characterized by a profound concentration of capabilities among a few dominant actors, resulting in AI systems that primarily reflect the languages, cultures, and contexts of the regions in which they are being built. This excludes the linguistic diversity, cultural context, and distinct needs of billions of people worldwide. Indigenous languages remain largely absent from AI capabilities, gender biases are embedded in AI systems due to a lack of diverse datasets, the needs of persons with disabilities are an afterthought, and communities whose cultures are not reflected face barriers to meaningful participation in the digital economy and its opportunities for socio-economic mobility.

As with all transformative technologies, the deployment of AI risks exacerbating existing inequalities and perpetuating new forms of exclusion. Yet when developed and deployed thoughtfully, AI offers unprecedented opportunities to ensure that those currently excluded and overlooked are offered equal access to its transformative benefits. The Inclusion for Social Empowerment Chakra addresses these challenges by fostering the development and deployment of AI systems that are inclusive by design, locally relevant, and culturally respectful. This chakra focuses on the design, development, and deployment of AI systems that actively account for and accommodate the diverse needs, identities, and experiences of all users, ensuring accessibility for individuals with disabilities, cultural and linguistic representation, and meaningful participation in AI development and usage.

This chakra aims to ensure that all individuals and communities, particularly those traditionally left behind, can actively shape and benefit from AI's transformative opportunities while preserving and celebrating the rich diversity of human experience.

Technology-Led Governance for All

As AI systems become key levers for socio-economic transformation, concerns around safety, transparency, and trust have come to the fore and highlight the need for robust, technology-enabled safeguards. While traditional regulatory approaches have focused primarily on policy instruments and compliance mechanisms, there is a growing recognition that effective AI governance requires technology-enabled solutions that can match the sophistication and scale of modern AI systems. Current governance approaches remain fragmented, with limited access to advanced governance tools such as machine unlearning capabilities, privacy-enhancing technologies, algorithmic auditing systems, and automated bias detection mechanisms. This technological governance gap is particularly pronounced in the Global South, where regulatory capacity may be limited along with a lack of access to the technical tools necessary for effective AI oversight.

Critical gaps persist in democratized access to pre-deployment safety testing tools, algorithmic transparency technologies, and automated compliance monitoring systems. This technological divide threatens to create a two-tiered global governance system where effective AI oversight becomes a privilege of technologically advanced regions rather than a universal capability.

Further, the absence of interoperable governance and assurance mechanisms underscores the urgency of collective action to ensure that AI advances are safe, inclusive, and aligned with shared values.

The Safe and Trusted AI Chakra addresses these challenges by democratizing access to technology-enabled governance tools and frameworks. Rather than relying solely on regulatory instruments that may stifle innovation, this chakra focuses on empowering all nations and stakeholders with the technical capabilities needed to govern AI effectively. This chakra ensures that robust AI governance becomes accessible globally, enabling the Global South to participate meaningfully in AI oversight while fostering continued innovation and technological advancement.

Sustainable AI for Resource-Efficient Innovation

The rapid expansion of AI has delivered transformative opportunities but also created steep environmental and resource costs. Training and deploying large models consume significant electricity and freshwater for cooling, while many AI applications remain dependent on high end infrastructure. This trajectory risks widening global disparities, as nations with limited access to power, compute, and cooling resources are left behind. Without corrective measures, AI’s growth could deepen inequalities, undermine system resilience, and exclude the Global South from its benefits. To ensure AI supports sustainability and equitable development, it must be designed to operate efficiently and reliably across diverse contexts.

The Resilience, Innovation, and Efficiency Chakra seeks to promote innovations that enhance the efficiency and sustainability of the entire AI lifecycle. This chakra will promote frugal and resource-conscious AI that is lightweight, modular, and adaptable to local realities. This is essential to ensure that all countries, including those with limited resources, can equitably access and benefit from the transformative potential of AI.

AI to Advance Global Science

AI is increasingly demonstrating its potential to advance scientific discovery by accelerating research, enabling complex simulations, and generating new insights across disciplines. However, access to AI tools, infrastructure, and collaborative research opportunities remains uneven across regions and institutions. This disparity contributes to persistent gaps in scientific capacity, funding, representation, and opportunities for collaboration, particularly in the Global South.

The Science Chakra focuses on expanding avenues for the responsible use of AI to accelerate scientific innovation and discovery. It promotes inclusive collaboration and cooperation within the global scientific community, particularly by strengthening research ecosystems and partnerships in the Global South, enabling AI to be more effectively leveraged to address shared and region-specific challenges.

This chakra also emphasizes the importance of open, interdisciplinary research, ensuring that AI-driven science contributes meaningfully to global knowledge and sustainable development.

Equitable Access to Foundational AI Resources & Infrastructure

The rapid evolution of AI capabilities has significantly increased the resources required for developing competitive AI systems, extending beyond data, compute, models, and talent to also include critical minerals and materials vital for supporting the underlying infrastructure. Currently, these resources are economically and geographically concentrated in specific AI development centers. This concentration has led to AI solutions that often rely on structurally limited training datasets and a narrow user base for innovation, design, evaluation, and testing. As a result, these AI systems often fail to represent the diverse global social realities, including economic, linguistic, and cultural diversities, as well as regional priorities. Efforts to make these resources more widely available have been insufficient, exacerbating existing inequalities within and between countries. If AI is to benefit the Planet and all its People for the Progress of all, we will need to ensure the democratization of resources critical for its development.

The Democratizing AI Resources Chakra addresses these fundamental imbalances by by forging pathways for equitable access to the essential building blocks of AI innovation. This chakra aims to transform AI development from a privilege of the few into a collaborative endeavour that harnesses collective intelligence and serves collective needs. By ensuring that all nations have access to the tools necessary for AI innovation, this chakra will enable the emergence of diverse AI solutions that reflect the full spectrum of human experience and contribute to truly inclusive technological progress.

AI to Advance Development Goals

AI has the potential to transform critical sectors of the global economy and advance Development Goals by enhancing service delivery, expanding access, and driving inclusive growth. However, its application in public interest sectors remains limited and uneven, particularly across countries in the Global South. Fragmented solutions, lack of scalable infrastructure, and the absence of shared frameworks hinder the effective and context-sensitive deployment of AI for social good.

The Social Good Chakra addresses these challenges by enabling the identification and scaling of AI applications that advance public interest goals across critical sectors. This chakra focuses on creating frameworks and platforms that enable successful approaches to be adapted and replicated across different geographies. By establishing mechanisms for knowledge and resource sharing and cross-border collaboration, this chakra ensures that AI-driven innovations for social good can be more widely and equitably realized, allowing all countries to benefit from proven development solutions.