Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra urged the graduating class of Mahindra University to combine the capacity to evolve with distinctly human strengths; ethics, compassion and moral purpose, as artificial intelligence reshapes work, in his address as Chancellor at the university's fifth annual convocation.
The ceremony also underscored the deepening involvement of India's automotive industry in higher education and skills training. Bajaj Auto Managing Director Rajiv Bajaj attended as chief guest and inaugurated the newly built Bajaj Engineering and Skills Training Centre on the university campus that morning, a facility funded by the two-wheeler maker and abbreviated, as Mahindra noted with characteristic humor, as the "BEST" Centre.
Mahindra used his welcome remarks to credit Bajaj with two qualities he said defined the executive's career: innovation and global leadership. He pointed to the structural transformation of Bajaj Auto and the revival of the Chetak, the scooter brand the company reinvented for the electric era , as evidence that "the best way to honor a great legacy is not simply to preserve it, but to reinvent it." He also cited Bajaj's brand-building across Africa, Latin America and Asia, where the Pune-based manufacturer has become one of India's most visible mobility exporters.
The collaboration is notable in an industry context. Mahindra & Mahindra and Bajaj Auto compete in adjacent segments of India's mobility market and are both navigating the transition to electrification, yet their leaders are converging on a shared concern: the supply of engineering and technical talent. Indian automakers have repeatedly flagged skill shortages in areas such as software-defined vehicles, electric powertrains and advanced manufacturing, and several ; including Tata Motors, Toyota Kirloskar and now Bajaj , have invested directly in training institutions to build their own pipelines.
Guest of honor Dr Pradeep Khosla, Chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, was also recognized at the ceremony. Mahindra said Khosla had briefed the university's board on his vision for the future of higher education.
The core of Mahindra's address, however, was directed at the roughly 22-year-old graduates themselves. He described a generation that has absorbed a pandemic, wars reshaping the global order, visible climate change and the arrival of AI systems performing tasks that once thought only humans could do. The traditional career templates of doctor, lawyer, engineer, civil servant, MBA , no longer hold, he said, with new jobs appearing as quickly as old ones disappear.
Borrowing from popular culture, Mahindra compared the class of 2026 to the X-Men, arguing that extreme conditions had given the cohort capabilities earlier generations lacked: comfort with ambiguity, familiarity with perpetual change and fluency in "collaborating with machines." He paired the metaphor with Swami Vivekananda's teaching that "all power is within you," concluding that the generation's real advantage lay in a dual capacity , which is to evolve outwardly and to awaken inwardly.
For an automotive industry recruiting heavily from campuses like Mahindra University, founded by the Mahindra Group and home to engineering programs aligned with mobility, AI and manufacturing; the speech doubled as a statement of the talent profile automakers now seek. Mahindra told graduates that a generation "about to be handed extraordinary technological power" would be judged not only on technical adaptability but on how it deployed ethics, humility and curiosity, attributes he said machines cannot supply.
"May your superpowers serve you, and the world, well," he said in closing.