Indian-American tech billionaire and venture capital investor Vinod Khosla believes the future of white-collar work is starkly different from what exits today. This will coincide with the advent of Artificial General Intelligence or AGI.
AGI is a term coined by researcher Mark Gubrud in 1997 and later developed to define an advanced form of AI with an intelligence equivalent to humans, in the face of new and complex scenarios.
“I define AGI as when AI can do 80 percent of all jobs which have economic value—whether you are a structural engineer, farm worker, assembly line worker, a doctor or an accountant. I think we will be there in the next two years,” said Khosla.
During a closed session at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Khosla said people in India do not believe that the whole idea of IT services will go away. “By 2030, there will be no such thing as IT services, there will be no such thing as a BPO. Those will be gone. There will be new kinds of services based on AI that Indian companies can bring to the rest of the world because India has the best engineers and the best talent and education,” he said.
Khosla added that the difference between AI and capability is huge, and that the magnitude is not recognised.
While this changes the outlook on white-collar work as we know today, the large-scale adoption of AI by governments will also make access to a lot of public and private services free, including medical and legal advice, education, agronomy, entertainment, transport, and so on.
“TikTok without content creators is completely possible today with Sora 2. They don’t have enough chips to keep serving people today,” added Khosla. He gave the example of short-form one-minute content and stories being created by AI the world over.
He added that AI adoption was yet to address hard areas like housing and had the potential to make essential human needs free over time. However, the adoption of AI across different countries will hinge on the politics of these nations, according to Khosla. “Wherever social change is involved, politics is involved,” he explained. “My general view is that the adoption of AI will be different in different countries because the politics are different in different countries. And politics, not technical capability, will be the key determinant of what is adapted and what's not adapted.”
Khosla, an early investor in OpenAI through Khosla Ventures in 2018 when it was still a non-profit, said: “There was no way everybody would have agreed to invest in OpenAI in 2018 when it was a non-profit with no product plan, no revenue plan, and no notion of when the technology would work.” He added that having to build consensus for an investment results in missing out on outliers.
First Published: Feb 17, 2026, 18:27
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