By Rajesh Nambiar, President, NASSCOM
Someone asked me at a conference recently whether India is winning or losing the AI race. I think that is the wrong question. If the race is defined by who builds the biggest or most powerful frontier model, it will inevitably be a contest among a handful of global labs with enormous capital and compute.
But that is not where the biggest economic value will ultimately be created. The more consequential race is about who can make AI work at scale—in banks, hospitals, entertainment, government departments and global enterprises.
If we are talking about building from India for the world from day one, Galleri5 is an interesting example. Its founder, Rahul Regulapati, and his studio recently released India’s first AI-generated television series. It reflects the shift underway.
As AI moves fast, builders need more than tools—they need platforms to build, ship, govern and secure what they create. Platforms such as GitHub and GenAI Foundry programmes by Nasscom and Microsoft are helping teams move from experiments to products people can trust.
Three things are working together: a huge, fast-moving developer base, enterprises that are actually putting AI into production and public digital infrastructure built to work at the scale of over a billion people. Put those three together, and each one makes the others stronger.
India did not invent the first wave of computing, but it built a world-class developer ecosystem and turned it into a global IT services industry. That pattern is repeating, only faster. India is now GitHub’s largest developer community, with over 27 million developers, including 2 million who joined in 2026.
Indian developers are also the world’s second-largest open-source contributors, with more than 7.5 million contributions to AI projects. India’s technology industry is on track to cross $315 billion in FY26, growing 6.1%. AI services already account for $10-12 billion and are expanding at a mid-teen pace.
TCS’s annualised AI revenue run-rate reached $2.6 billion in Q1 FY27, up 13.6% quarter-on-quarter. Infosys reported AI revenue of $417 million, or 8.2% of total revenue, while HCLTech’s advanced AI revenue rose 10.3% sequentially to $171 million.
A Nasscom Global Enterprise Survey of 500 companies found that around 25% have moved agentic AI from pilots into production. Deloitte’s 2026 enterprise AI survey ranks India first among 15 countries on at-scale adoption, with 40% of Indian respondents reporting significant or full AI use, against a global average of 28%.
McKinsey estimates that AI and agentic AI could create a $300-400 billion opportunity by 2030 across enterprise transformation, data and application modernisation, infrastructure, agent management and security and governance. This is where three decades of Indian IT services experience in enterprises, domains and integration matter more than raw model capability.
Underneath this is something few countries possess: infrastructure built to operate at population scale. Over the past decade, India has built digital systems for identity, payments and data that reach hundreds of millions.
The road ahead, however, requires sustained investment in infrastructure and R&D, while continuing to adapt as models evolve. It also opens a large opportunity in forward-deployed engineering, where technology teams work alongside customers to implement and adapt AI systems rather than simply hand them over.
This creates a reinforcing cycle. Indian founders are building for global customers, working with partners and investors worldwide, and moving quickly from idea to product. That ambition is visible in companies such as Sarvam AI, Krutrim and Qure.ai. In this race, how fast you learn may matter as much as how good your model is. India is well placed to learn fast.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.