Is Artificial Intelligence Mankind’s Most Transformative Technology?

Thoughts as we celebrate the National Technology Day tomorrow

Is Artificial Intelligence Mankind’s Most Transformative Technology ?

Subimal Bhattacharjee

Every generation believes it is living through the most consequential moment in human history. Usually, it is wrong. But when Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute declares, without equivocation, that “AI is poised to be the most transformative technology of the 21st century,” the claim warrants serious examination. Because unlike past episodes of techno-optimism, this one is backed by data — and by a velocity of change that no prior technology has matched.

As India celebrates National Technology Day tomorrow commemorating the day in 1998 when a newly confident nation detonated the Shakti nuclear tests and launched its Trishul missile, it is worth pausing to recognise that the real explosion of capability in our era is quieter, faster, and reaches further than any weapon. It is happening on servers, in hospitals, on farms, and inside the financial system. It is called Artificial Intelligence.

Let us begin with money, because money tells the truth about where civilisations are placing their bets. Global corporate AI investment reached $252.3 billion in 2024, growing more than 13 fold over the previous decade, according to Stanford’s AI Index. Private investment alone climbed 44.5% that year, with generative AI capturing over 20% of all AI-related private funding. In 2025, the acceleration continued: Gartner estimates total worldwide AI spending encompassing hardware, software, and services, reached nearly $1.5 trillion, crossing $2 trillion in 2026 and projected to rise to $3.3 trillion by 2029. Generative AI led the surge, growing more than 200% in private investment and capturing nearly half of all private AI funding, with billion-dollar funding events nearly doubling year on year.

To contextualise this: the entire GDP of India today is approximately $3.9 trillion. The world is spending nearly as much on a single technology annually as India produces in output across all its sectors.

Why? Because the returns justify it. The estimated value of generative AI tools to American consumers alone reached $172 billion annually by early 2026, up from $112 billion just a year earlier, with the median value per user tripling in that same period. Penn Wharton’s Budget Model projects that AI will increase global GDP by 1.5% by 2035, nearly 3% by 2055, and 3.7% by 2075- a permanent, compounding upward shift in the level of economic activity. PwC’s 2026 AI Performance Study, which surveyed 1,217 senior executives across 25 sectors, found that the leading AI-adopting companies are using the technology not merely for efficiency but as “a catalyst for growth and business reinvention.”

That distinction, between efficiency and reinvention, is the crux of what makes AI categorically different from every technology that came before it.

The Capability Leap No Prior Technology Has Achieved

The steam engine amplified human muscle. The printing press amplified human reach. The internet amplified human communication. Each was extraordinary. But none of these technologies could improve themselves, write their own code, diagnose disease, or design molecules.

AI can do all of these, and the pace of improvement is staggering. On the GPQA benchmark (a graduate-level test of scientific reasoning), AI performance improved by 48.9 percentage points in a single year. On SWE-bench, which tests agents on real-world software engineering tasks, performance leaped by 67.3 percentage points in the same period. AI agents went from 12% task success on OSWorld, which tests AI on real computer tasks across operating systems, to approximately 66% in one year. The estimated value generative AI delivers is now so high that over 70% of organisations globally report using it in at least one business function, up from 55% just two years ago.

This is not incremental progress. This is compound capability growth and it is happening across every domain simultaneously.

Redefining the Capability Index, Sector by Sector

Healthcare and Drug Discovery. The traditional drug development pipeline takes 10 to 20 years from initial concept to market approval. AI is compressing that pipeline. AI-designed therapeutics are now in human trials. AlphaFold, DeepMind’s protein-structure prediction model, cracked one of biology’s hardest problem - predicting how proteins fold, in ways that decades of conventional research could not. The pharmaceutical sector is projected to derive between $350 billion and $410 billion in annual value from AI by 2025, driven by innovations in drug development, clinical trials, and precision medicine. AI is not just accelerating discovery; it is making previously impossible research tractable.

Agriculture. India’s 140 million farming households know intimately how much depends on the monsoon. In 2025, the University of Chicago and India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare used Google’s NeuralGCM AI model to deliver longer-range monsoon forecasts to 38 million farmers — helping them decide what to plant and when. This is not a pilot or a promise. It is AI operating at national scale, with direct impact on food security. Globally, AI adoption in agriculture has reached 80%, as the technology transforms irrigation, yield prediction, pest management, and supply-chain logistics.

Education. Over 80% of American high school and college students now use AI for school-related tasks. AI tutoring services are growing at 17.9% annually. Predictive analytics powered by AI is reducing student dropout rates by 22%. For a country like India with 250 million students, a severe teacher shortage in rural areas, and 22 official languages, AI tutoring that adapts to a student’s pace, language, and learning style is not a luxury. It is an equity intervention.

Finance and Business. The manufacturing sector sees 80% of firms investing in smart AI-driven operations. Retail AI adoption stands at 77%. In finance, AI is transforming everything from fraud detection to credit underwriting to portfolio management. PwC’s research shows that AI leaders are increasing the number of decisions made without human intervention at nearly three times the rate of their peers - not recklessly, but by building systems with appropriate guardrails that free human judgment for higher-order problems.

Science. Beyond individual sectors, AI is becoming infrastructure for scientific discovery itself. From biology and chemistry to physics and astronomy, AI is enabling researchers to analyse data at scales and speeds that were previously unimaginable. Google’s Gemini achieved a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. AI weather models are now operating at global scale. The 2026 Stanford AI Index dedicated an entirely new chapter to AI’s expanding role in scientific domains — a recognition that the technology has crossed from tool to collaborator.

India’s Moment Within This Moment

National Technology Day was born from India’s assertion that it belonged among the world’s technological powers. That assertion has been vindicated many times over since 1998 - in software, space, pharmaceuticals, and digital public infrastructure. The UPI payments network, Aadhaar, and CoWIN are evidence that India can build technology systems at a scale and ambition that the world admires.

The AI era offers India an asymmetric opportunity. Unlike the industrial revolution, which required vast physical capital that India lacked, or the semiconductor revolution, which required supply chains that remain concentrated elsewhere, AI scales on data and talent, both of which India possesses in abundance. India’s 1.4 billion people generate data across agriculture, health, language, and commerce that, if harnessed responsibly, could power AI models tuned specifically to the subcontinent’s needs.

The government’s India AI Mission, with its focus on compute infrastructure, foundational models, and responsible governance, signals that policymakers understand the stakes. The question is whether execution can match the ambition.

The Honest Reckoning

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what AI is not. It is not infallible and documented AI incidents rose to 362 in 2025, up from 233 the previous year. It is not equitable by default as 74% of AI’s economic value is currently captured by just 20% of organisations. It is not without labour-market disruption as employment for junior software developers aged 22 to 25 has fallen nearly 20% since 2024. And the environmental cost of training frontier models at the scale of Google’s $150-billion-plus annual compute spend is real and growing.

But no prior technology - not the printing press, not electricity, not the internet, arrived without dislocation, inequality, and risk. The measure of a technology’s significance is not its absence of costs; it is the magnitude and breadth of what it makes possible.

By that measure, AI stands alone.

The Verdict

In 1998, India’s scientists looked up at the sky above Pokhran and affirmed a capability. Today, India’s technologists, researchers, farmers, doctors, and teachers are, often without realising it, already living inside the AI era. The capability being affirmed now is not the power to destroy but the power to extend: to extend human intelligence, human reach, human longevity, and human possibility in ways that no technology before it has managed.

As India will mark another National Technology Day, the most fitting tribute to the spirit of 1998 is to approach AI with the same combination of ambition, rigour, and national self-belief that carried Pokhran. The technology is evolving and evolving very fast. The question, as always, is whether we are.

Jai Hind