Indian Market Has a Cost Advantage, Need to Solve India-Specific Issues

Speakers at the Mint AI Summit 2025 said India's market can be a test case for AI solutions for the entire world

- Manas Pimpalkhare

A panel of top artificial intelligence (AI) leaders in India said making the technology in the most populous country can aid in creating it for the world as such models are relatively easy to scale up.

Manish Gupta, senior director, Google DeepMind, indicated that developing AI models in India would make the models robust, as they would work for a large and diverse population.

"Google started its AI research lab in India about five and a half years ago. So, we consciously picked this theme of 'inclusive AI'...How do we develop AI in a manner that benefits everyone. And we saw huge gaps in capabilities of our own models. For instance, in languages like English versus so many languages spoken in India. I look at all the challenges in India as a source of competitive advantage," said Gupta.

Echoing the sentiment, Geetha Manjunath, chief executive officer (CEO) and founder, Niramai Health Analytix said the Indian "jugaad" method has a considerable cost advantage over developing AI in other jurisdictions.

"We know there are a lot of problems in India, and that is good. Because necessity is the mother of innovation. What you do in a jugaad way to save costs and develop high-quality products with limited resources will definitely be useful to the rest of the world.

Because we want to save costs everywhere, be it the UK's healthcare costs for the NHS, or be it mediclaim-medicare costs in the US, reducing costs is always good. So we can develop for India," said Manjunath.

Jugaad refers to an innovative way of improvising to complete any task.