Artificial Intelligence is reshaping labour markets across the world. A recent UN “Gender Snapshot 2025” report estimates that nearly 28% of women’s jobs globally are at risk of automation by AI, compared with 21% of men’s jobs.

In India, women’s participation in the workforce has improved in recent years—official estimates suggest female labour force participation has risen from about 23% in 2017–18 to 42% in 2023–24—but women remain concentrated in informal, low-paying and routine roles that are more vulnerable to automation.

The question, therefore, is not whether AI will change women’s work, but whether women will be prepared to shape that change. Yashoda AI, the National Commission for Women’s AI literacy programme, offers one emerging model for how India can move from anxiety about displacement to a deliberate strategy of empowerment.

Understanding the Gendered Future of Work

The gendered nature of work means AI will not impact everyone equally. Women are over-represented in occupations such as routine clerical work, customer support, data entry, basic retail operations and back-office processing—precisely the kinds of roles where AI and automation tools are already being deployed at scale. The UN warns that without targeted intervention, AI could reverse gains made in women’s economic participation.

At the same time, AI is generating new roles and hybrid tasks: content and social-media management, telehealth support, AI-assisted teaching and tutoring, data labelling and annotation, digital marketing, and micro-enterprise management using AI tools. These jobs often do not require coding, but they do require AI familiarity—comfort with prompts, platforms, dashboards and automated workflows.

This creates a dual reality:

• Women are more exposed to displacement risk due to occupational patterns.

• Women are also uniquely positioned to benefit from AI-enabled micro-entrepreneurship and distributed digital work—if they receive timely AI literacy and skilling support.

AI Literacy as the First Step to Economic Inclusion

AI literacy should be understood as economic infrastructure, not a luxury skill. It is less about learning algorithms and more about building digital agency: the ability to understand what AI can and cannot do, to evaluate information, to protect one’s data and dignity, and to use AI tools to enhance income and productivity.

Evidence from India’s MSME sector shows what becomes possible once basic digital comfort is in place. A 2025 MSME Digital Index report found that over 73% of small businesses in semi-urban and rural India saw higher income or improved efficiency after adopting digital tools, and 79% of women respondents reported a measurable positive impact on business performance from digital adoption. 

However, the majority of these gains come from relatively simple tools such as UPI, basic apps and smartphones. The next leap—using AI-driven tools for work—will require structured, accessible AI literacy programmes that speak to women in their own language and context, and that treat AI not as an elite technology but as a practical everyday resource.

Yashoda AI: A New Workforce Readiness Pathway

The Yashoda AI programme, launched by the National Commission for Women (NCW) in May 2025 in collaboration with Future Shift Labs, is designed specifically to close this gap. It is an AI literacy programme for women that aims to enhance digital inclusion, cybersecurity awareness and safe online practices. 

According to official data, around 3600 women from rural and semi-urban areas had already been trained under Yashoda AI by November 2025, with a wider target of reaching over 1 million women across the country. 

The model is built on a few distinctive elements:

• Interactive Training Workshops- Covers basics of AI, practical use-cases, cyber safety, digital rights. Targets SHG leaders, ASHA/Anganwadi workers, students, homemakers, teachers, and frontline officials.

• Multilingual Toolkits- Offers hands-on resources to help women detect deepfakes and online fraud, use AI tools like chat assistants, translation apps, and safely report cyber incidents.

• ‘AI Sakhi’ Network- Trains local women leaders as digital mentors and first responders, creating peer-to-peer learning channels.

• Community Learning Models- Collaborates with schools, SHGs, NGOs, and local digital hubs to expand access through village centres and educational institutions.

• National Awareness Campaigns & Dialogue- Promotes AI ethics, safety, and showcases women-led AI adoption stories to influence behavioural and policy change.
  
  

By positioning AI as a life skill rather than a niche technical field, Yashoda AI offers a template for workforce readiness that is realistic for women who may be entering or re-entering the labour market from informal or home-based roles.

From Awareness → Literacy → Employability

The pathway from awareness to employability can be thought of in three stages:

1. Awareness- Women are first introduced to AI through practical examples they already interact with—such as voice assistants, translation tools, digital filters and recommendation algorithms. This foundational stage highlights both opportunity and risk, addressing concerns related to deepfakes, online fraud and digital abuse. Building familiarity reduces fear and creates the motivation to learn.

2. Literacy- Once trust is established, learning shifts to functional usage of AI tools through task-based exercises. Examples include:

• Drafting messages, CVs or basic marketing content using generative AI

• Managing household or enterprise finances using AI-enabled applications

• Translating and summarising complex information into local languages

• Using AI chat interfaces to access government schemes, market data or consumer trends.

This stage builds digital confidence and shifts women from being passive technology users to active decision-makers.

3. Employability and Enterprise
   As AI competence becomes embedded, women begin integrating these tools into real work processes:

• A home-based entrepreneur creates digital product catalogues and automates customer engagement.

• A community health worker uses AI to interpret guidelines and deliver information in local dialects.

• A farmer-producer group applies AI for pricing insights, proposal drafting and cooperative management.

At this stage, AI moves from being an awareness tool to a productivity and income enhancer.

This progression aligns closely with existing national skilling frameworks—Skill India, PMKVY 4.0 and DDU-GKY. Integrating AI literacy within these programmes can turn traditional skilling into AI-enabled workforce preparation, enabling women not just to adapt to the future of work but to shape it.

Policy Framework and Scaling Blueprint

For AI-enabled work to be viable for women at scale, AI literacy and safety must be embedded into economic inclusion policies, not treated as supplementary.

Priority actions include:

• Ministry of Women & Child Development- Integrate AI literacy and cyber safety modules (using models like Yashoda AI) into Mission Shakti and women’s enterprise/SHG initiatives.

• Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship- Under PMKVY 4.0, extend AI-tool proficiency—prompting, evaluation and workflow integration—as a core skill across trades, not limited to technical roles.

• MeitY & the IndiaAI Mission- Recognise women-focused AI literacy initiatives as part of national AI infrastructure, and embed them into state implementation plans.

• State Governments- Pilot district-level AI literacy hubs in convergence with NCW programmes, educational institutions and civil-society partners, with scope for state-wide scale-up.

Conclusion

AI will not just change how women work—it will determine who gets to participate in the next phase of India’s economic transformation. Without deliberate intervention, women are at risk of being automated out of routine roles. With the right investment in AI literacy and digital confidence, they can instead emerge as frontrunners in productivity, entrepreneurship and adaptive work models.

Yashoda AI demonstrates what this pathway can look like in practice: beginning with safety and awareness, building functional digital agency, and translating that capability into economic opportunity.

If India positions AI literacy for women as basic economic infrastructure on the same level as access to electricity, banking or mobility—then the future of work will not simply unfold for women.

It will be shaped by them. This shift is essential for realising the vision of Viksit Bharat @2047 not just an AI-powered India, but an AI-enabled and women-led India.