‘We Made People Zombies,’ Raj Vattikuti Warns Students Using AI

Indian engineering students have spent years being told to learn more. Raj Vattikuti has a different message: forget everything you know.

The Founder and Executive Chairman of Calibo believes AI is changing the value of what students are taught, what companies hire for, and even how much a traditional degree matters.

His argument is uncomfortable for an education system built around exams, memorisation and credentials: knowing a technology tool may soon be worth far less than knowing how to solve a business problem.

Vattikuti has spent nearly 50 years watching technology go through multiple cycles. He started at Chrysler in 1977, later founded Covansys, which Computer Sciences Corporation acquired for $1.3 billion, then built Altimetrik and now leads Calibo. His pitch today is that AI is different from the technology waves that came before it because it can fundamentally simplify how businesses operate.

And that, he believes, should also change how India prepares its young workforce.

“You just learn some tools; it’s not a tool you have to learn overall AI. That’s the only way you can get employability and all these,” he tells AIM.

The idea is straightforward. Instead of producing graduates who know a collection of tools, India needs people who understand a business problem, figure out what needs to change and use AI to make it happen.

That is also why Vattikuti is particularly dismissive of the idea that simply knowing how to use ChatGPT makes someone AI-ready. He believes that distinction is becoming increasingly important as companies look beyond people who can merely use AI tools and start looking for people who can actually create outcomes with them.

A Quess Corp 2026 analysis cited during the interview found that 6,63,000 people had simply added AI skills onto a completely different job. India’s total AI talent pool, meanwhile, was projected to double from roughly 600 to 6,50,000 to 1.25 million by 2027.

For Vattikuti, the bigger problem is not whether India has enough people who can use AI. It is whether it has enough people who can innovate with it.

“I think over the years we have created close to 15 million IT talent in India, and there’s at least another 10 million or more people needed for this talent who are very focused on innovation,” he says.

That is a very different definition of AI talent.

It also explains why Vattikuti is challenging the traditional education pipeline. He argues that students should not spend years memorising information that AI can increasingly retrieve, process and apply.

His own experience illustrates the shift. He told parents that degrees still have value, but questioned how much of what students memorise actually survives into their working lives.

“It’s not a degree. We all have degrees. You know how much I really use this? The only thing—the basic engineering principles—I still use. That’s about it. All the memorisation is gone and all these things,” he says.

“We made people zombies. They aren’t even able to think it through anymore.”

For Vattikuti, this is where AI could actually become a reset button.

Instead of making students spend years learning increasingly fragmented technologies, he wants them to enter the real world earlier, understand businesses and work on actual problems.

“Throw them into the real world and they can do wonders.”

His own programme is built around that idea. Students go through a six-month curriculum focused on helping businesses innovate, with an emphasis on use cases, outcomes and engaging directly with businesses. The goal is not to create another generation of people who can operate another set of enterprise tools.

It is to create people who can figure out which tools should disappear altogether.

That is another of Vattikuti’s more controversial predictions. “Then AI can change the entire gamut of the business, including eliminating a lot of this technology.”

He argues that companies have spent the last 25 years accumulating layers of technology without necessarily producing equivalent innovation.

“In the last 25 years we put so many investments in technology and hardly created any reality. They call transformation; they never call innovation. Even today people say another transformation. Transformation is a very bad word for the business.”

AI, he believes, gives enterprises an opportunity to reverse that complexity.

His prediction is unusually specific: spreadsheets, analytical tools, emails and other workflow technologies could eventually disappear as AI becomes embedded into the way businesses operate.

“Eliminating all the workflow tools, spreadsheets, analytical tools, emails; all these things can be eliminated.” But Vattikuti’s argument is not that humans become irrelevant. In fact, it is almost the opposite.

He believes the more AI takes over execution, the more important human judgment becomes.

“The shift is that it’s not AI first. Its business judgment data as a product is first. Then AI becomes very powerful for the business.”

That is why he pushes back against the current obsession with making everything “AI-first”. Businesses, according to Vattikuti, should first know what they are trying to achieve, have trusted data and make the judgment about what needs to happen. AI then becomes the mechanism for executing and scaling that judgement.

The same philosophy runs through his argument about education.

India has already created a huge technology workforce. The next opportunity, he believes, is to turn that workforce into an innovation workforce.

He wants the programme to scale aggressively, aiming to generate “at least 1,00,000 people every year” over the next three to four years.

And he sees a much bigger prize than employability.

Vattikuti believes these students could build companies themselves.

“They can even become a CEO of the company. You know that’s the kind of opportunity they can get.”

For parents accustomed to measuring a child’s future through college rankings, degrees and job titles, that is perhaps the most radical part of his argument.

His advice is not to panic about AI. It is to stop preparing children for a world that may no longer exist. “There’s a great opportunity today for them to really go to the places in a big way because these are smart kids; they can do their own business; they can help other business to grow many things they can do so encourage them in a big way doing that.”

And he expects that shift to arrive quickly.