A smartphone with the most powerful chip in the world is still useless at 3% battery. Nothing about the processor has changed. What's gone is the one thing everything else depends on: Charge.
India Inc is currently obsessed with the chip. Every boardroom conversation is AI adoption, automation, AI-readiness. What's missing is the battery; the workforce that has to actually run all this technology. And right now, a lot of that workforce is quietly draining. Technology can only multiply the output of people who are well enough to use it. Give an exhausted employee the sharpest AI tool available, and you still have an exhausted employee. AI will shape the future of work. Employee health will decide how much of that future we actually get to use.
Health conditions once common among employees in their 40s and 50s are now showing up in their late 20s. Burnout used to be a rough patch. Now it is background noise.
The real worry isn't absenteeism--that shows up on a dashboard on its own. This is presenteeism: the employee who is on every call, replies on Slack at midnight, is physically present, and is running at half capacity because they haven't slept properly in weeks. It doesn't look like a health problem. It looks like a slow quarter, a dip in an engagement score nobody investigates.
{{/usCountry}}The real worry isn't absenteeism--that shows up on a dashboard on its own. This is presenteeism: the employee who is on every call, replies on Slack at midnight, is physically present, and is running at half capacity because they haven't slept properly in weeks. It doesn't look like a health problem. It looks like a slow quarter, a dip in an engagement score nobody investigates.
{{/usCountry}}The data backs this up. A recent industry report by ekincare found that over a third of Indians have vitamin deficiencies, and nearly one in three show early signs of diabetes or cardiovascular risk. Preventive check-ups and therapy consultations are rising too, which is good news wrapped inside bad news more people are seeking help because there is more to seek help for, Think of the employee who used to be first online every morning, sharpest in the room. Over a few months, deadlines start slipping by a day, then two. Nobody calls it a health issue, because it never looks like one until someone finally asks if they're okay and the honest answer has been no for a while. That's not disengagement. That's a battery running on empty while everyone kept adding apps.
Physical fatigue and chronic conditions quietly erode focus. Anxiety and burnout blunt exactly what companies say they hire for- judgment, creativity, collaboration. For years, corporate India has treated wellness as an event: A step challenge in March, a yoga session before Diwali. What is needed isn't more of these. It is making the basics boring, consistent, and always on.
Smarter organisations are shifting from managing talent to building resilience--treating prevention as infrastructure, not initiative. That means routine health check-ups as default, not exception. It means talking about mental health as openly as deadlines. It means using workforce health trends, anonymised and privacy-protected, to design benefits people actually need, not ones that photograph well for a brochure. When health outcomes sit on the same leadership dashboard as revenue and attrition, wellbeing stops being HR's problem and becomes that of the business.
This is where the AI conversation gets genuinely interesting. AI-powered diagnostics can already flag early health risks and recommend timely screening. But no algorithm can walk someone into a doctor's appointment, fix a sleep schedule, or sit with a colleague mid-burnout. That stays human: managers, culture, systems that make it easy to act on what the data already knows.
The opportunity is not choosing between AI and employee health. It's using AI to catch warning signs earlier while building a culture that responds to them. The companies that get this right won't have the flashiest AI stack- they will be the ones who invested in their people with the same seriousness they invested in their platforms.
None of this needs a grand overhaul. It needs a mindset shift: from reactive healthcare to preventive health care personalised benefits, regular screening, mental wellbeing taken seriously before it becomes a resignation letter. The warning signs are already on the dashboard.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored Buvanesh Kumar, associate director, human resources, Eli Lilly Services India Pvt Ltd.