By Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman, 5F World, Honeywell Automation India & GTT Data Solutions
There have been many naysayers in the last three decades who criticised Indian IT for only trading on its vast pool of trained manpower and putting them on client projects onsite and offshore. The clamour to build products and intellectual property out of India has been louder after the recent launch of StarGate from US and DeepSeek from China and there is an expectation that Indian innovation will come to the fore with a slew of large language models and AI products and platforms emerging from Indian startups and incumbent services firms.
The national and industry hype about human-centric AI solutions from India has also generated optimism! However, a reality check will show that we are still far from converting this mirage into real dollars.
What we lack are three key enablers — very weak levels of core research with the overall national levels of 0.7% of GDP falling far short of global averages of 3%. The ecosystem to support entrepreneurs through all stages of capital needs is also missing with angels, venture capitalists and private equity wanting definite returns in three to five years.
And finally, do we really have a new breed of entrepreneurs who will focus on deep tech and product thinking and stay the course without getting distracted by the easy and profitable revenues of services? Participating in a $300 billion IT industry with successful forays into small and narrow language models and agentic AI applications seems to be the easy way to start and scale and in the case of existing players, to pivot and grab opportunity share.
Cities like Tianjin in China and organisations like Alibaba have invested wider and deeper in AI than we have done as a nation. With a visionary MeitY and a keen interest shown by Nasscom and all industry players, it is never too late, but we must try harder and take this second chance to change the trajectory and performance metrics of our technology industry.
