India is possibly the world leader in AI-first startups today, Amit Kumar, director and head of digital natives business at Google Cloud India, said at the event.
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“India is leading the world in adoption of generative AI, which is also helping to solve real world problems in areas like financial inclusion, health-related problems and agriculture,” Kumar said, adding that Indian companies have bold ambition.
For instance, Indian deeptech companies are working on large language models (LLM) for India, building at a population scale, and these can be exported globally, he added.
India is maturing into a large economy at a time when we are becoming data rich, noted Umakanth Soni, chairman of AI Foundry, a venture studio for AI startups. As the foundational technology of AI depends on data, India can develop the ‘India way’ rather than the US or China way, by looking at data as an asset, he added.
Infosys co-founder and president, Infosys Science Foundation, Kris Gopalakrishnan highlighted that India’s unique digital public infrastructure will transform digitisation in the country and presents an opportunity for startups to leverage for business.
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“This will completely transform the way digitisation happens in the country, which I believe is a better way than the way it has developed in the west, where you have a few players owning the whole thing – owning the application, owning the data, owning the services,” he said.Gopalakrishnan said that India’s new way of doing things is enabled by the government, by philanthropic and non-government organisations creating open-source protocols and code, and entrepreneurs who develop applications on top of that.
After the success of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), India will see DPI like the health stack bringing hospitals and insurers together, and the digital lending platform empowering farmers and eventually MSMEs for near-instantaneous credit access, Gopalakrishnan pointed out.
The Government eMarketplace (GeM) will by next month enable easy loan access on the GeM Sahay app, which is built on another DPI, the Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN), GeM officials said at the event.
“The single biggest thing we have on our side is the timing,” said Zetwerks CEO Amrit Acharya, adding that in a China+1 geopolitical scenario along with the government’s ‘make in India’ policy, the world, especially markets like the US, are increasingly looking at India.
The emotional argument is in India’s favour at the moment, and if companies get the economics right, the demand can be infinite, he said.