Express Adda Highlights: Pratyush Kumar says AI will create more work, but India must ‘brutally upskill’

India will need to create 100 million new jobs over the next eight years as around one million people turn 18 every month, Rajan Anandan, Managing Director at Peak XV Partners, said at Express Adda. "Twelve million Indians enter the workforce every year," he noted, arguing that job creation cannot rely on a handful of IT companies alone. Instead, Anandan said, a new generation of entrepreneurs and AI-driven businesses will be key to creating employment as the country enters the next phase of industrial evolution.

Asked how AI would reshape employment in sectors such as IT services, railways and defence, Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Sarvam AI, said the world is going through a period of rapid transition. "The world is in flux. There will be a whole lot more to do," he said, adding that the current phase is about "human-maxing"—using AI to enhance human productivity. Kumar stressed that massive upskilling will be critical, saying, "India will absolutely have to upskill. This transition is ultimately positive for humans."

Responding to a question on government support for AI, Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Sarvam AI, said the Centre has taken a progressive approach through the IndiaAI Mission. He said the government funded 40% of the cost of building Sarvam AI's models, while private investors covered the remaining 60%. "The government has been thinking progressively about it," Kumar said, describing the IndiaAI Mission as a step in the right direction.

Highlighting India's strengths in the AI hardware ecosystem, Rajan Anandan, Managing Director at Peak XV Partners, said 20% of the world's semiconductor designers are based in India. He added that the country now has around 40 semiconductor startups, with nearly 30 already funded. "That number will grow into several hundreds," Anandan said, pointing to rising momentum in India's chip design ecosystem.

Responding to a question on the viability of building AI businesses for India's 1.4 billion people, Rajan Anandan, Managing Director at Peak XV Partners, said India is taking a different approach from global frontier AI labs. "90 to 95% of what enterprises need can be done with smaller models," he said. Anandan added that such models require far less capital to train than frontier-scale models, making them more practical for enterprise adoption in India.

Sarvam AI's models are significantly cheaper than leading global alternatives, Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Sarvam AI, said at Express Adda. "Our AI models are five times cheaper than GPT and nine times cheaper than Gemini Flash," he said. Kumar said global frontier labs are building "one-size-fits-all" models for the world, while Sarvam AI is focused on developing cost-efficient models tailored to India's needs.

Drawing a comparison with OpenAI's early years, Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Sarvam AI, said building frontier AI models is a long-term process that requires sustained investment in talent and expertise. "OpenAI started in 2015 with the goal of building extremely large AI models. We are only in our third year," he said. Kumar noted that Sarvam AI began without prior experience in training frontier AI models at scale but has steadily built those capabilities. "There is no way India won't be ultra-competitive in AI because the country's demand will force us to be ultra-competitive," he said, adding that AI leadership requires skills, engineering, compute and capital.

Responding to a question from Anant Goenka on what gives India the right to compete across the AI stack despite the dominance of the US and China, Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Sarvam AI, said artificial intelligence stands apart from other technologies. He said AI ranks at the top on two key dimensions — its economic value and its frontier technology potential. "If you plot technologies on two axes — economic value and frontier technology — AI is at the top of both," Kumar said, explaining why the technology presents a unique opportunity for India.

India is still in the early stages of the artificial intelligence race, but 2026 marks the year the country truly entered the AI game, Rajan Anandan, Managing Director at Peak XV Partners, said at Express Adda. He suggested that India is now at the beginning of a new phase in AI development, with growing momentum around homegrown innovation and ecosystem building. "India is early in the AI game. 2026 is the year India entered the AI game," Anandan said.

The latest edition of Express Adda, featuring Rajan Anandan, Managing Director at Peak XV Partners, and Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Sarvam AI, will begin shortly. The discussion is expected to focus on India's AI ambitions, sovereign AI, large language models, compute infrastructure and the country's role in the global AI race. The session will be moderated by Anant Goenka, Executive Director, Indian Express Group, and Soumyarendra Barik, Assistant Editor, The Indian Express.

Sarvam AI is building a trillion-plus-parameter foundation model from scratch in India, targeting use cases such as coding, cybersecurity, scientific research and simulations. The startup says its models will offer a more affordable alternative to global AI platforms for enterprise and voice AI deployments. It has also unveiled speech recognition support for all 22 scheduled Indian languages, multilingual voice commerce tools and AI models for processing large datasets, while expanding its sovereign AI collaborations with government and regulated sectors.

Rajan Anandan, Managing Director at Peak XV Partners, has been one of the key figures shaping India's technology ecosystem for more than two decades. From leading Google India and Southeast Asia and Microsoft India to mentoring AI startups through Peak XV's Surge programme, Anandan has played a pivotal role in the country's digital growth. He has consistently argued that India's AI success will depend on building affordable, indigenous AI capabilities backed by a strong innovation ecosystem.