How AI rewired work and life: The always-available partner for daily tasks

It's been three years since AI disrupted daily life with the launch of ChatGPT. It is now ubiquitous and, even amid fears of job losses and a looming bubble, the future is more rather than less AI

In the league of disruptive technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) is right up there with the steam engine, electricity, automobiles, computers, and the internet. But it seemed only geeks could comprehend this technology until  American AI research firm OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. AI quickly became as easy to use as a search engine and reached millions of users within weeks. 

Today, AI is the intelligent layer behind everything we do, and you cannot afford to miss out. Companies trailing in the AI race are trying hard to catch up. Technology major Apple, seen as falling behind its rivals in the race to add AI features to its products, named veteran researcher Amar Subramanya as its vice-president of AI, replacing John Giannandrea, on December 1. 

“The dynamics are shifting between employees and AI, where AI acts as an intelligent layer, helping teams operate better,” Nitin Rakesh, CEO and MD, Mphasis, a mid-tier IT services firm, said. 

AI is shrinking time to produce research reports, infographics, presentations, videos or images. AI is making chatbots and robots intelligent — so much so that now contact centres and warehouses can run almost without humans. AI is also the must-have co-worker changing human-machine engagement. 

Hari Balaji, partner, technology consulting, EY India, said, “The disruption is structural—entry level, rule-based tasks are being consolidated. Companies are reconfiguring hybrid pods of humans plus AI agents, and are demanding fusion skills, where humans provide judgment and AI agents deliver at scale, speed and consistent execution.” 

Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished V-P and analyst at Gartner added, “AI acts more like a collaborator than a tool. It has lowered the barrier to innovate, enabling even smaller firms to challenge incumbents, via AI-native operating models.” 

As it turns businesses, society and life on their head, AI has also spread fear of job losses and sparked debates about humans losing their edge and critical thinking abilities. Nonetheless, there will be more, and not less, use of AI in 2026 and beyond. 

The scale of AI use and spread is staggering. It took ChatGPT five days to reach 1 million users; Facebook took 10 months, Twitter (now X) 2 years and Netflix 3.5 years. According to OpenAI data, ChatGPT soared from 100 million weekly users in November 2023 to 300 million in 2024 and 800 million weekly users in November 2025. Google’s Gemini has 650 million monthly active users, while Grok (xAI), Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity have 18-30 million users a month for their AI platforms. 

Collectively, AI assistants now reach well over a billion people — a milestone it took smartphones nearly a decade to hit. And people send over 2.5 billion prompts to AI platforms every day. 

Behind these numbers is a deeper transformation reshaping how people work, learn, transact, build businesses and, increasingly, how they think. Across industries, AI is no longer a futuristic promise. It is no less than a foundational digital infrastructure, and its use is expanding across enterprises in India, as elsewhere. 

India scales AI use 

“India has seen some of the sharpest AI-driven productivity improvements globally, especially in white-collar work such as writing, coding, analysis and customer interactions. AI co-pilots are now embedded across BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), IT services, consulting, health care,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, partner, True Search India, an executive search firm. According to a September 2025 report by software firm Atlassian, 77 per cent of India’s knowledge workers now use GenAI daily, reporting 33 per cent higher productivity. 

AI virtual assistants draft emails, generate code, analyse documents, detect fraud patterns, and handle customer queries. In companies, from banking to manufacturing, employees now spend more time reviewing, refining and deciding, rather than doing the first draft of anything. 

According to a NITI Aayog report, AI for Inclusive Societal Development (October 2025), AI adoption could add $500-$600 billion to the Indian economy by 2035. The report shows how AI can empower India’s 490 million informal workers by expanding access to health care, education, skilling, and financial inclusion. The report also stresses that technology can bridge deep social and economic divides, ensuring the benefits of AI reach every citizen. 

Across workplaces, AI is saving 8–10 hours of work a week per employee, according to EY’s AIdea of India 2025 study, released in November. Airtel has been able to block spam messages and calls using AI, Axis Bank has seen a 30 per cent uptick in product conversions (term deposits, mutual funds, credit cards) after deploying GenAI assistants. Hindustan Unilever (HUL) generates over 100,000 retailer ads and processes 25 million product images monthly, using AI. Banks are also deploying AI to tackle the menace of digital arrests, scams and frauds. 

In IT services, the shift has been game-changing. Nearly 90 per cent of Infosys’ 270,000 workforce is now AI-aware, using AI copilots in daily operations. Satish H C, executive vice-president and chief delivery officer, said, “Infosys developers have produced approximately 25 million lines of code through generative AI tools. We’ve deployed AI agents across our internal operations. A multi-agent invoice automation solution alone unlocked $50 million in incremental cash flow.” 

At Tech Mahindra, productivity gains range from 30–50 per cent, and AI tools contributed to a 17 per cent jump in business performance in some cases. Kunal Purohit, president, Next Gen Services, Tech Mahindra said, “We have seen higher productivity gains in greenfield projects compared to existing brownfield projects where legacy complexity tends to limit the pace of transformation.” 

The largest transformations are happening at companies that embed AI deeply across their operating fabric. Mphasis, for instance, anticipated the pivot early. CEO Rakesh points to an explosion in AI-led deals. The company posted its highest-ever quarterly total contract value (TCV) of $760 million, 68 per cent of which was AI-led. 

The most visible impact of AI’s rise comes from OpenAI’s direct enterprise footprint. More than one million business customers globally — including some of India’s largest brands — now use OpenAI’s models. For instance, Delhi-based Mankind Pharma uses customised AI models to help sales reps communicate in multiple languages, plan better, and boost outreach effectiveness. Digital Green, which provides agriculture intelligence to farmers in India and elsewhere, built chatbot Farmer.Chat, delivering agricultural advice to 250,000 farmers. The cost of support dropped from $35 to 35 cents per farmer. 

Vahan, a recruitment platform for blue and grey collar workers, uses OpenAI models to match workers with jobs, cutting hiring turnaround time by 20 per cent. Meanwhile, IT services company HCLTech has rolled out ChatGPT enterprise at scale, embedding it in day-to-day work across teams. 

The startup ecosystem is also building on AI. “AI has gone from emerging technology to core strategy,” said Neha Singh, cofounder of Tracxn, a data intelligence firm. Since 2022, India has seen 780 AI-native startups emerge — that’s 58 per cent of all active AI-native companies in the country today. An amount of $2.6 billion has gone into AI startups since 2022. The government is pushing too, with initiatives such as the IndiaAI Mission, providing 38,000 Graphic Processing Units, semiconductors used for AI workloads, besides funding for AI labs and fellowships. 

Perhaps the most profound shift is behavioural. Interactions with machines are no longer transactional — they’re conversational, multimodal and multilingual. 

Teaming with AI 

“Employees increasingly team with AI,” said Chakraborty. Tech Mahindra’s Purohit sees roles played by humans and machines evolving across different scenarios: “In complex, operational and repetitive tasks we see an AI-driven, human-supported approach, while in business processes reimagining and transformation, it is human-led and AI-augmented.” 

Consultancy EY estimates that 47 per cent of Indian enterprises have multiple GenAI use-cases in production, and satisfaction rates are high: 74 per cent of organisations say outcomes meet or exceed expectations. According to Capgemini research, around 12 per cent of IT budgets are going into AI projects. 

But challenges remain, including high costs, governance hurdles and job losses as tasks shift to chatbots and AI agents. There’s also the fear of an AI bubble building. Global investor Ruchir Sharma, who heads the Rockefeller Foundation, said on CNN that an AI-powered stock market boom in the US may be “the most hated bubble in history.” 

He warned that rising prices, huge investments, and growing debt look very similar to what happened in past market crashes. Sharma pointed to four signs of a bubble building visible in today’s markets — overvaluation, over-investment, over-leverage, and over-ownership. 

Much like the dot com burst in 2000-01 gave rise to real internet businesses, an AI bubble burst could lead to hype giving way to real businesses. 

Gartner’s Chandrasekaran sees AI shifting from “assistants to autonomous agents, which execute entire workflows across business functions. Specialised AI models (in health care, banking and other sectors) and AI-driven automation will give birth to new roles like agent orchestrators, AI auditors, designers and so on.” 

Three years after ChatGPT’s debut, millions interact with AI daily — not as a tool but as a collaborator, sounding board or even a companion. With models capable of humour, empathy and nuance, the line between machine and human is thinning. AI writes first drafts, offers career advice, drafts business strategies, does school projects, diagnoses diseases, matches workers to jobs, and answers questions. 

For many, it is the always-available partner, getting ever more deeply embedded in our daily lives. 

 

The writer is a New Delhi-based independent journalist