IIT Global conference organizer Shashi Tripathi told Jon Fortt that AI should be treated as an extension of human capability, not a replacement β€” graduates who do so will outcompete peers. Many young IITians, he said, are bypassing shrinking coding jobs to start companies. Meanwhile, India is racing to catch up on AI: the recent India AI Mission drew 250,000 attendees, and the country's 27 languages and cultural variety could feed richer LLM training data.