India's AI future ecosystem hinges on home-grown models

INDIA'S AI ECOSYSTEM may be expanding at a reasonably fast pace, but the technology community feels that progress without inclusion could deepen inequality.

- 

At the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2025 on Wednesday, founders said the country must build domestic AI models rooted in local languages, industrial needs and affordable cloud infrastructure. They said that the question is not whether India will adopt AI, but whether every citizen and business will be able to access it.

This came most clearly from Sarvam.ai co-founder Vivek Raghavan, who stressed that capability without reach is a recipe for exclusion. "The AI divide, if we are not careful, can be much worse than the digital divide. We all know that in our lives we can have significant efficiencies and improvements in what we do. But that needs to go to everybody," he said. For him, India's next leap must ensure AI is not reserved for the top tier of society and industry.

Gnani.ai co-founder Ananth Nagaraj added that AI is quickly shifting from advantage to necessity, and that the country cannot depend on systems trained for foreign conditions.