AI models will quickly automate the majority of expert work, but they will struggle with the final, most complex 25%. For a long time, human expertise will be essential for this 'last mile,' making it the ultimate bottleneck and source of economic value.

The biggest opportunity for AI isn't just automating existing human work, but tackling the vast number of valuable tasks that were never done because they were economically inviable. AI and agents thrive on low-cost, high-consistency tasks that were too tedious or expensive for humans, creating entirely new value.

Contrary to expectations, analysis shows that sectors with low profit per employee, such as healthcare and consumer staples, stand to gain the most from AI. High-tech firms already have very high profit per employee, so the relative impact of AI-driven efficiency is smaller.

The primary economic incentive driving AI development is not replacing software, but automating the vastly larger human labor market. This includes high-skill jobs like accountants, lawyers, and auditors, representing a multi-trillion dollar opportunity that dwarfs the SaaS industry and dictates where investment will flow.

The narrative of AI destroying jobs misses a key point: AI allows companies to 'hire software for a dollar' for tasks that were never economical to assign to humans. This will unlock new services and expand the economy, creating demand in areas that previously didn't exist.

The anticipated AI productivity boom may already be happening but is invisible in statistics. Current metrics excel at measuring substitution (replacing a worker) but fail to capture quality improvements when AI acts as a complement, making professionals like doctors or bankers better at their jobs. This unmeasured quality boost is a major blind spot.

For India, "leapfrogging" with AI means overcoming systemic resource shortages. AI acts as a horizontal productivity multiplier, enabling, for example, a limited number of doctors to deliver better healthcare outcomes through AI-powered diagnostics, thus enhancing sectoral capacity without massive infrastructure investment.

AI's primary impact will be augmenting and increasing productivity across entire organizations, not just automating lower-level tasks. The technology can handle a fraction of almost everyone's job, freeing up humans to focus on strategic, creative, and interpersonal work that models cannot perform.

Beyond making current services cheaper (the "Affordability Unlock"), AI enables a "Possibility Unlock" by making new service models operationally feasible at scale. This creates net-new demand for services, like continuous preventative healthcare, that couldn't exist before, fostering entirely new markets and job ecosystems.