India's AI moment is about diffusion, equal access and implementation

Industry leaders say India's AI edge will come from deployment, skilling and responsible governance, not just model-building or infrastructure scale

Indian industry leaders at the AI Impact Summit converged on a clear theme: India’s artificial intelligence (AI) moment will be defined less by breakthroughs in model-building and more by how effectively the technology is diffused across the economy.

 

“What foundational models are doing is speeding up evolution. But what we’ve learned is that diffusion of technology is a different ball game… how do you get technology to a billion people?" said Infosys Cofounder Nandan Nilekani, speaking at the AI Impact Summit alongside Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic.

 

Skill development — and how India’s population of more than a billion people can meaningfully use AI — will be critical to the country’s progress, speakers said.

 

Building on this, Rishad Premji, executive chairman of Wipro, argued that India’s edge in AI will hinge on deployment rather than scale. He said the country’s strength lies in developing talent that can apply AI with context and judgement, extending beyond engineers to sectors such as healthcare, small businesses, and frontline operations.

 

“India’s advantage in AI will not be defined only by the size of our models or the scale of our infrastructure. It will be defined by the choices we make about where we apply AI, how we diffuse it, how responsibly it is deployed, and whether we can translate capability into real impact,” Premji said.

 

Calling AI a structural shift rather than a routine technology cycle, Roshni Nadar Malhotra, chairperson of HCLTech, urged a sharper focus on intellectual property–led value creation and responsible deployment. She said clarity of thought and governance would be the real differentiators in the AI era, observing that the technology ultimately reflects how societies choose to deploy and scale it.

 

Meanwhile, Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Enterprises, highlighted the depth of the shift underway, describing AI as the “digitisation of cognition” that will underpin every sector of the economy. He urged India to build on its existing digital foundations over the next four to seven years, calling the moment a rare opportunity to unlock faster economic growth and transformation.