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AI could replace 80% of work in most jobs: Vinod Khosla
“Almost certainly, with no doubt, there isn’t a job where AI won’t be able to do 80 percent of 80 percent of all jobs,” Khosla said.
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Malvika Choudhary - Mon, 04, Aug 2025
- 15:09 EDT
- 21
Vinod Khosla / YouTube (Nikhil Kamath)
Indian-American billionaire and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla warned that artificial intelligence (AI) could replace as much as 80 percent of all existing jobs.
“Almost certainly, with no doubt, there isn’t a job where AI won’t be able to do 80 percent of all jobs,” Khosla said during a conversation with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath on the People by WTF podcast. “So 80 percent of all jobs—AI will be able to do most of it within the next three to five years.”
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Co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, Khosla underscored that the coming AI revolution will be more transformative than anything witnessed in recent decades. “We’ll see more change in the next 15 years than we’ve seen in the last 50,” he said.
Radical transformation
Khosla also sounded a warning for India’s IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors, saying these industries will “disappear” unless they transform radically. “Software IT services will mostly disappear. Disappear means transform pretty radically,” he said.
According to Khosla, unless companies reduce costs drastically or reimagine their services, they risk becoming irrelevant in a market where AI can offer the same services at a fraction of the price.
Generalist over specialist
While warning of widespread disruption, Khosla emphasized that opportunity lies in adaptation. He advised young professionals to stop relying on fixed professions or specialized degrees and instead focus on developing first-principles thinking, resilience, and the ability to learn quickly. “You have to optimize your career for flexibility, not a single profession,” he said.
He added that being a generalist will be key to thriving in the AI-driven future. “Don’t be a specialist; be a generalist,” Khosla said, arguing that creativity, critical thinking, and the ability to connect across disciplines will become more valuable than technical depth alone.
‘College is dead’
Challenging the traditional education model, Khosla called college degrees increasingly obsolete in an AI-powered world. “If every child in India has a free AI tutor—something entirely possible today—it would be better than the best education a rich person can buy,” he said.
Referring to CK-12, the nonprofit education platform co-founded by his wife, Neeru Khosla, he explained how AI can deliver high-quality, personalized education at scale. “You don’t have to go back to college for three or five years to switch from electrical engineering to mechanical engineering—or from medicine to something else,” he said.
A societal equaliser
Despite his warnings, Khosla said AI has the potential to act as a societal equalizer. In his vision, AI could provide high-quality healthcare, legal, and financial services at near-zero cost—especially in developing countries. “A village in India will get better cardiac care than I can get at Stanford,” he said, citing the scalability and consistency of AI-driven expertise.
He concluded by stressing that it is not access to AI but the human choices around how it is used that will determine the future. “The people who don’t know how to use AI will be obsoleted by people who know how to use AI first,” he said.
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