Corporate leaders push for AI localisation to drive India's tech growth

With artificial intelligence (AI) picking up pace, corporate leaders stressed the need for its localisation in India. Speaking at the CII's AI India Global Exhibition and Summit here on Friday, industry experts highlighted that India's AI growth hinges on building indigenous language models and datasets.

 

Underscoring the importance of creating India-specific large language models (LLMs), Rishi Mohan Bhatnagar, managing director-India and global chief technology officer at AA2IT, a staffing and information technology solutions firm, said, “We need to create our own LLM modules so that our own datasets can help create and push our own perspective and narratives. The whole world is looking at India to take the lead.”

 

Bhatnagar also pointed out that his organisation is actively working on Bharat LLM. “We are progressing well on Bharat LLM, addressing challenges such as diversity, language, and culture. Initially, we started with 5 crore manuscripts in India, creating datasets to build a strong foundation for AI development,” he added.

 

Lovneesh Chanana, senior vice-president and regional head of government affairs (Asia Pacific and Japan) at SAP, a software solutions company, said, “From a data perspective, we are observing a significant shift. The more local data we capture, the more reliable our AI systems will become.” He added that under the India AI mission, the government has started inviting proposals for developing local LLMs.

 

Emphasising the need for AI solutions tailored to India's socio-economic challenges, Rohit Chauhan, India head of corporate affairs at Tata Consultancy Services, said, “AI is good for augmentation, but it has to be an integrated approach. We need to focus on India-centric use cases that address our socio-economic challenges, similar to how DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) was built.” He added that India must develop its own sovereign cloud and create a sandbox environment for startups to test and scale AI use cases.

 

Sandeep Gupta, managing director of Protiviti Member Firm for India, said, “At some point, we will have an India-centric AI framework ensuring citizen privacy and curbing false narratives. In certain sectors, we may even mandate local data storage, with regulators like the Reserve Bank of India playing a role in defining these norms.”

 

The corporate leaders also acknowledged concerns about AI misuse and urged regulatory clarity to balance innovation with governance.