Diffusion of technology a different ballgame: Nandan Nilekani at AI summit

Speaking at the AI Impact Summit alongside Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei, Nilekani said the bigger challenge lies in ensuring the "diffusion" of technology

India will play a defining role in shaping how artificial intelligence (AI) translates into real-world impact at scale, but this will be done not by building foundational models but by mastering the far more complex challenge of “diffusion”, Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani said on Thursday. 

 

“What the foundational models are doing is speed of evolutions, but what we have learned is that diffusion of technology is a different ball game… how do you get technology to a billion,” Nilekani said during a discussion with Dario Amodei, chief executive officer (CEO) of Anthropic, at the ongoing India AI Impact Summit. 

 

 

Nilekani added that India should focus on becoming the AI ‘use-case capital of the world’.

 

He further reiterated that AI needs India to show the actual use of the technology. “Because this is where we are going to show it working. The history of India’s digital journey, we have the political leadership that is committed, technologists, and enough people with the right value system to make this happen and we have done this before. India will be where you will see most of the deployment of AI in a tangible way,” he said. 

 

Nilekani also said that today there is a race to the top and bottom in the field of AI, and the race to the bottom is faster. “So, all of us, who have a stake in AI being useful to humanity, have to accelerate and redouble our efforts to make the diffusion happen. Otherwise, the consequences are going to be very difficult. There is going to be a backlash,” he explained. 

 

Amodei also talked about the centrality of India in AI, describing it as one of the most promising environments for translating the technology’s capability into tangible outcomes. While acknowledging rapid progress in areas such as software engineering and biomedical research, he noted that the economic impact of AI is still constrained by slow adoption.

 

“There’s a duality between the fundamental capabilities of the technology and the time it takes for those capabilities to diffuse into the world… Even if we froze the technology today, the economic impact could be much greater,” he said. 

 

Amodei added that Anthropic is doubling down on India, not just through a newly announced partnership with Infosys, but by focusing on the “long-tail” of Indic languages. Sonnet 4.6, released this week, features significantly improved performance across 10 Indic languages.

 

Both Nilekani and Amodei concluded that the real test of AI will be on the impact. “India is one of the places in the world I wonder if there could be 20 per cent to 25 per cent growth… unknown in the world. But I think it kind of stacks all the factors for a very bullish picture,” Amodei said.

 

“I don’t know about 25 per cent — if I get 10 per cent, I’ll be happy. The focus has to be on inclusion. This AI has to work for people,” said Nilekani.