Why India's Al future needs both sovereign control and heritage depth

India's AI next phase may depend on combining sovereign control with heritage depth, while enterprises build domain-specific models from their own knowledge.

- By Shrikanth G

India's AI moment is now moving beyond pilots, hype, and the usual sovereignty debate.

Articul8 is building its position around secure, domain-specific generative Al for mission-critical enterprise environments. That approach is already visible in its expanding global playbook, including its partnership with ITOCHU Techno-Solutions in Japan, focused on bringing secure Al to sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, and energy.

In this conversation with Dataquest, Arun Subramaniyan, Founder and CEO of Articul8, brings that lens to India's next Al chapter. His central point is that India does not need to choose between sovereign capability and broader relevance. It needs both. For enterprises, that makes the discussion far more practical than ideological. The real advantage will come not from generic Al tools, but from turning years of institutional knowledge into domain-specific AI that can work securely, accurately, and at production scale.

You have said India may benefit more from a heritage-model approach than a purely sovereign one. What does that mean in practical terms for Indian enterprises?

India needs both. Framing this as either one or the other is a false choice.

Think of it this way. Sovereign models are like having a defence force. They protect you. They secure your most sensitive data, your critical infrastructure, and your strategic capabilities. Every serious nation needs them. India absolutely needs sovereign AI capability: models trained on Indian data, running on Indian infrastructure, under Indian control. That is nonnegotiable for defence, nuclear, banking, and critical government systems.