Involving educational institutions at early stages necessary: Zoho's Vembu

Vembu stressed that stronger and earlier partnerships from the educational institutions industry would help India build practical and scalable AI solutions

Zoho Corporation Founder Sridhar Vembu on Tuesday said that India must bring industry into the education system early to fully benefit from artificial intelligence (AI), while addressing the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi.

 

Speaking at a session titled ‘Ministry of Education: Pushing the Frontier of AI in India’, Vembu stressed that stronger partnerships between educational institutions and the industry would help India build practical and scalable AI solutions.

 

Vembu said that collaboration should begin early, so that universities and companies can jointly shape research, applications and talent development in AI. According to him, such partnerships are essential if India wants to stay competitive in this fast-moving field. 

"We predominantly serve the rural student population, and have seen the education from the ground up. I'm most excited about using AI tools to solve those challenges, including helping teachers to reach students better," he said.

 

"Teachers could use tools to help the students improve. These are purpose-built small models that can solve a specific problem well. We encourage our students to build projects... Nowadays, we are even building small-scale, like a custom EV auto... Here, the way AI is working is as a massive learning booster," he added.

 

Centres of Excellence 'absolutely critical'

 

Rajan Anandan, Managing Director at Peak XV Partners, highlighted the importance of the centres of excellence (CoE), saying, “CoEs have been absolutely very important, because cutting-edge research comes from either leading AI labs or leading universities. The fact that we now have several of these centres of excellence is absolutely critical.”

 

Following last year’s Budget announcement, the government established a CoE in AI for Education at IIT Madras.

 

Anandan also assured AI startups that funding is not a constraint. He said there is enough capital available for companies building useful and differentiated products.

 

He added, “When it comes to AI in India, we will win the application layer. India already has more consumer native AI startups than the US, which is quite remarkable. The reason behind this is that India has 900 million connected internet users, 850 million of them are daily active users they spend seven hours a day on the internet. And there are literally thousands of unmet needs.”

 

AI as important as printing press

 

Vibhu Mittal, Technologist and Innovation Leader at Inflection AI, compared AI to the invention of the printing press. He said, "AI is as important as the printing press.” Explaining further, he noted that when the printing press was introduced, there was debate about whether countries should allow its widespread use because publishing was seen as risky. Countries that did not adopt it at scale fell behind in education.

 

He added, “If you don't learn to read, you won't be able to read to learn. If we don't build our own LLMs, the inability to use AI will cause any country to fall further and further behind," he said, stressing the need for India to have its own large language models (LLMs).

 

Noting that AI is an amplifier, he said, "It can make a single person as productive as a much larger number of people. It can help us fill gaps that exist in every organisation. And so I think it's very critical that India have its own LLM and its own models."

 

'India can create scalable, holistic AI model'

 

The session also consisted of leading academicians, including Manindra Agrawal of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-K), V Kamakoti of Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M), and Sunita Sarawagi from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B).

 

Speaking at the summit, Kamakoti expressed confidence that India could create a scalable and holistic AI education model. He said, “I'm sure this blueprint that we aspire to create will be one that will demonstrate to the world the scalability that we are going to create.”

 

He spoke about India’s focus on moral values and holistic development in education. He also highlighted India’s linguistic diversity and the need to use AI to bridge language gaps. Referring to AI tools that can translate speech into multiple languages, he said this is crucial for education, especially because learning in one’s mother tongue improves understanding and grasp of concepts.

 

Over the last decade, the Ministry of Education has progressively laid the foundations for AI-enabled education through national digital platforms, policy frameworks, institutional reforms, and large-scale capacity building initiatives spanning school education, higher education, skilling, and advanced research and innovation ecosystems.