India’s AI moment: From global back office to innovation powerhouse driving the next tech era
As the global race to lead in artificial intelligence intensifies, India finds itself at a pivotal inflection point. For decades, the country earned its reputation as the “back office of the world” — a trusted partner for IT services and outsourced talent. But now, with the rise of indigenous AI startups, government-backed compute infrastructure, and domestic product-led companies, the narrative is shifting. The question is no longer whether India can adopt AI, but whether it can author it.
Speaking at the BT AI Summit 2025, Ankit Bose, Head of AI at Nasscom, argued that the transition has already begun. “If you think of startups a decade back, it was seen almost as taking a break from work,” he recalled. “Today, most youngsters want to build something new.” According to Nasscom, India now hosts nearly 2,700 native AI startups, with generative AI ventures accelerating rapidly. “We have gone from 150 GenAI startups to 890 in just over a year. These are product companies,” Bose emphasized.
He pointed to Zoho — often called India’s quiet technology giant — as a case study. “Zoho is a classic example of a product-led, innovation-driven company. And there are many Zohos in the making right now.”
For Nitin Naredi, Partner at Deloitte India, the next decade is about shifting from being consumers of global AI to becoming creators. “For the last several years, India has largely been a consumer of AI models developed elsewhere,” he said. “Now the tectonic shift must happen.”
He highlighted government support as a key enabler. “You will soon see India’s AI governance framework really empower startups, SMEs, and innovators to experiment without fear. Safe sandboxes and structured regulatory buffers will give confidence to innovate,” he said.
But Naredi stressed that talent readiness must accelerate: “Every school — from a government school in a tier-3 town to a top metro school — must introduce AI fluency. Deloitte has committed to ensuring 100% of our employees are AI-fluent by year-end. That kind of scale is needed nationally.”
Both Bose and Naredi pointed to Zoho as proof that world-class product companies can be built in India without Silicon Valley dependencies. Zoho’s Praval Singh described the company’s 30-year philosophy: play the long game.
“Technology hype cycles come and go — cloud, mobile, AI. You don’t build a Zoho overnight,” Singh said. “We are not chasing headlines. We are building for trust, privacy, affordability, and longevity.”
Zoho today operates 18 global data centers, develops every line of core code in India, and has customers in 150+ countries. Its AI strategy follows the same philosophy: build what is needed, not what is hyped.
“Everything is not a large language model problem,” Singh cautioned. “Scanning a receipt in an expense app doesn’t need a trillion-parameter model. Most real business problems can be solved with smaller, specialized models.”
Zoho has released lightweight 1B-, 3B-, and 7B-parameter models tailored for enterprise contexts instead of chasing massive consumer LLMs (Large Language Models).
Singh also emphasized Zoho’s unique talent model: hiring not just from top IITs but from tier-2 and tier-3 cities — even directly from schools. “About 10% of my colleagues never went to college,” he shared. “Talent is distributed; opportunity is not. Our job is to fix the opportunity side.”
On sovereign AI, Bose warned against copying the U.S. and China’s model race. “We don’t need to build the biggest model in the world — we must build the models that solve India’s problems,” he said. He pointed to national GPU cluster development and mission-mode AI research funding as progress, but insisted that application at scale is where India must lead.
India’s journey to becoming an AI innovation hub will require deep talent investment, patient capital, responsible governance, and belief in homegrown products. As Singh concluded:
“It is not the capability we lack. It is only the mindset. If we choose to build for the long term, India will become a global technology powerhouse.”
