Where does India stand in the global AI race? What will it take to win or lose in this tech that is so swift-footed and rapidly changing? What were the likely sectoral implications and what will the future look like? Answers to these and several other questions with fresh insights emerged at the much-awaited Express Adda on Monday.
Rajan Anandan, Managing Director at Peak XV Partners, and Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Sarvam AI were in conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, Indian Express Group, and Soumyarendra Barik, Assistant Editor, The Indian Express.
Taking off from an earlier Express Adda where global investor and author Ruchir Sharma reflected on “monomaniacal’ shift towards Artificial Intelligence globally and what was holding back foreign investors, Rajan Anandan set the context and the perspective needed to evaluate who will win or lose in times to come.
While finding truth in the lack of pure-play AI companies in the Indian public markets, Anandan does see 2026 as a defining year for India in AI. While India has entered the AI race this year, it is still too early to pass a verdict on whether it will win or not in this race. To get a realistic assessment of who wins, he feels it is crucial to think back to a couple of other technology waves and the time it takes before there is serious scale and leadership. Drawing an analogy from India’s journey in digital payments, where back in 2016, the year lunched the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Anandan reminds of the transformative journey for India in this space – starting out at a time decade ago when the country did not figure even among the top 100 entities in digital payments, it ended up gathering serious scale in a matter of 10 years.
He feels, a similar scene could well unfold for India in the AI arena too. After all, there were a confluence of several factors at play today. First, the biggest challenge of ‘compute’ was getting addressed. It was the biggest constraint, but starting at the AI summit in the national capital in February this year, there was $400 billion of AI capex announced by three large Indian conglomerates- Reliance, Adani & Tatas holding out hope on how compute will start getting unlocked. Second, Anandan sees these unfold at a time when several ground-up Indian models have been launched with stellar examples like Sarvam AI and BharatGen (launched by IIT Bombay). A third factor running in India’s favour is the emergence of the first big category of enterprise AI in the form of ‘Voice AI’ .
To Anandan, the country was also been witness to an explosion of application-level innovation, both for consumer AI in categories like entertainment, travel, healthcare and education.
To top it all, the semiconductor arena is also seeing heightened activity with founding of companies like Agrani Labs, a Bengaluru-based AI semiconductor startup that was into building inference GPU. Or a company like C2i, which stands for power chips.
All in all, the year 2026 has seen India join the AI race along with a confluence of factors enabling movement across the board from model launches to big capex investment announcements, all holding out promise in the rapidly evolving space