'We Must Now Make AI Our Greatest Multiplier' — Read Gautam Adani's Full Speech At Whistling Woods

Speaking on the rapidly emerging technology of artificial intelligence, Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani said that in today's world, AI is the new printing press, the new cinema, and the new diplomacy engine.

While speaking at Whistling Woods International, Adani said, "We must now make AI our greatest multiplier, the new sutradhar weaving the soul of Bharat into the fabric of the world".

"Respected Subhash ji, Raju Hirani ji, Karthik Aryan ji, Mahaveer ji, Badrinath Tiwari ji, Vivek Khanzode ji, Swati Mhase Patil ji, and Meghna ji, along with the Faculty of Whistling Woods International, Distinguished guests, and my dear young students, Namaskar.

What a remarkable privilege it is to stand before you this evening. Never did I imagine that an infrastructure entrepreneur like me would be speaking to some of the most creative minds of our country. This year is indeed special, marking the centenary celebrations of two towering legends: Guru Dutt ji and Raj Kapoor ji.

Together, they taught us that cinema is not just entertainment; it is poetry in motion, in colour, and philosophy, the heartbeat of a nation finding its voice. Raj Kapoor ji beautifully understood this. In the film Anari, he had sang: "Kisi ki muskurahton pe ho nisaar

Kisi ka dard mil sake toh le udhaar."

This was not just a lyric; it was a philosophy. A philosophy that was, and remains, the soft power of Bharat, of feelings expressed through art. What I also find fascinating is how brilliantly his act of a common man touched a deep emotion with Soviet audiences in the era of post World War II. Raj Kapoor ji was India's finest advocate of soft power, building a cultural bond that uplifted Indo-Soviet ties for generations.

And so, when Subhash ji invited me to speak, I had asked myself what wisdom could a builder of ports and airports possibly share with you? But as I reflected, I realized that every project I have built did not begin with steel, but began with a story. Before you lay a foundation in the ground, you must lay a foundation in the mind. Buildings will crumble. Empires will fade. But long after the lights go out and the final credits roll, it is the story that remains, lighting the path for those who come next. And perhaps no story reflects this spirit more beautifully than the one behind the creation of Whistling Woods.

A few years back, it was over breakfast that Subhash ji shared a story of a trip to America, where an immigration officer had looked at his passport and commented, "Ah, India! The land of Gandhi. What a remarkable film." Page 2 of 6 In that instant, a nation's identity was stamped not by its politics or power, but by a story, a film that had captured the world's memory. I vividly recall Subhash ji telling me that this simple comment led him to question his life's mission.

Why must it take Richard Attenborough from across the oceans to tell us Indians the story of our Mahatma? And so, I learnt how Whistling Woods was born. An institute built not by walls, but of a single man's dream, a dream that Bharat must tell her own stories to the world.

"Kyonki sapne wo nahin jo neend me aayen

Sapne wo hain jo Neend uda jayen"

My dear friends, every conversation with Subhash ji feels less like an exchange of words and more like opening a fascinating book, one where every page reveals to you an unseen truth about yourself. He does not debate; he awakens. By the quiet force of his questions and storytelling, he makes you look inward not to seek answers, but to stimulate reflection. His words turn questions into mirrors, and in those mirrors, you discover not answers but the deeper questions you must reflect on. And in one such conversation, he said something that has stayed with me.

"Gautambhai, to tell one's own story is not an act of pride, it is an act of preservation because silence is not humility, it is surrender. And every silence is the first step to forgetting who we are." I realized that, in some ways, one of the world's greatest storytellers was helping me trace my own story, not through success of balance sheets or presence in boardrooms but in the reels of my own memory.

Reels of the action packed Hindi films that shaped my ambition and my imagination. Reels of the magnetic pull of Mumbai within me that refused to fade. And Reels of the movies like Don and Zanjeer that always provoked the restless dreamer within me.

Subhash ji's narrative was like a torch revealing to me that I was never just building businesses; I was living out a film that began long ago. And the more I reflected, the more I sensed that deep within us we have a script already written that guides the choices we make, the paths we walk, and the dreams that pull us forward.

In that grand design, each of us becomes an actor, playing roles we may never have picked but were meant to play. And I felt as if Subhash ji's words were showing me my reflection, a reminder that I too was part of a story in motion.

A story that began with a 16 year old boy who left home for Mumbai with empty pockets but a sky full of dreams. And as I stood in the diamond markets at 16, built India's largest trading house by 30, went public at 32 and entered the ports and power businesses at 34, I was not following anyone's script. I was writing my own, believing that the film heroes I grew up watching could actually be lived in a real life.

"Aur filmon ne hee hume sikhaya, haarna mat, darna mat

Manzil duur ho phir bhi raasta badalna mat."

And so, my friends, this is the magic of stories. They don't just entertain us; they eventually transform us. Yet every light casts a shadow, and the power of storytelling can be a double edged sword.

In the right hands, it shapes nations. In the wrong hands, it manipulates minds. Today, narratives are no longer confined to cinema; they move markets, influence geopolitics, and rewrite destinies.

And this I can say from my personal experience, because I saw first-hand how swiftly a false script could be propagated when in January 2023 a foreign short seller, Hindenburg Research, launched a calculated attack against us.

It was not just a short seller report that they had published, but a manipulated script crafted to provoke doubt and amplified through multiple global echo systems.

In a matter of days, over $100 billion of our market value was erased, not because any fundamentals had changed, not because facts had failed, but because a totally false story had been weaponized.

Fast forward to today, and while we reclaimed the narrative completely and emerged far stronger post this attack, that period revealed a reality we are living in: an era where narratives move markets faster than numbers, where headlines can undo decades of hard work, and where stories of truth trail stories of perception.

And this experience taught me that in today's world truth must also be loudly told. For silence leaves space for others to script your destiny. If we do not narrate who we are, others will rewrite who we were.

That is why we must own our story, not with arrogance, but with authenticity, not as propaganda, but as purpose. "Kyonki khaamoshi me kho jaati hai pehchaan, likhni hogi khud ab dastan apni"

And as I had said at the beginning, this is exactly what Subhash ji had told me:

"To tell one's own story is not an act of pride, it is an act of preservation. Because silence is not humility, it is surrender." This is a lesson every leader and every nation must remember, and the one that best understood this was America.

Because when America promotes a global blockbuster movie like Top Gun, it is not just selling cinema; it is projecting power. Behind the dogfights and heroism lies brilliantly crafted narratives, one that showcases national pride, the might of the U.S. military, and drives exports, an image of American courage to every corner of the world. These films are not just stories. They are strategic instruments designed to shape perception, project US strength, and define US identity.

And the list is endless: Independence Day, Black Hawk Down, American Sniper, Rocky, Apollo 13, Rambo. Each a global superhit, projecting not just America's might but also its moral authority, proving that while soldiers may conquer land, the storytellers conquer mindshare.

For too long, India's voice has been firm within our own borders but faint beyond them. And in that silence, others have lifted the pen, sketching Bharat through their lenses tinted by bias and shaped by their convenience.

"Khamoshi humari unki kahani ban jaati hai

Aur humare dard se unki davit saj jaati hai"

And nothing reveals this bias more than the British film Slumdog Millionaire, a spectacle that sold Dharavi's poverty for Western applause, turning our pain into foreign award winning ceremonies. My dear friends, our weakness has never been imagination; it has been hesitation.

We are the land that lived the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, that sang through Kabir, that celebrated with Tansen, that filmed hope through Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt. Yet somewhere along the way we hesitated and forgot to seek the power our stories carried.

And today in an AI driven world where algorithms compose and machines narrate, the challenge deepens significantly, but so does the possibility.

AI is now the new printing press, the new cinema, and the new diplomacy engine, shaping what the world reads, watches, and believes. And we must now make AI our greatest multiplier, the new sutradhar weaving the soul of Bharat into the fabric of the world.

My dear friends, across history, scientific breakthroughs begin quietly in the hum of labs and in the minds of visionaries who see beyond the present. And over the past two decades, I have had the opportunity of watching two such revolutions unfold before my eyes: one in healthcare and the other in energy.

Both hold important lessons as the world of AI starts to penetrate the world of cinema. Taking the case of healthcare, the cost of gene sequencing has fallen by an astounding 99.9%. What once demanded billions can now be done for a hundred dollars.

This massive drop in cost did more than liberate technology; it unlocked the code of life, giving birth to personalized medicine and a new bio economy destined to shape the future of humankind. In energy, a similar miracle happened. The cost of solar panels has collapsed by over 99%, turning sunlight into the most democratic source of power on earth.

In its glow, geopolitics has been rewritten, fossil fuels challenged, storage technologies boomed, and an entire energy revolution worth trillions ignited. History, my friends, is a great teacher. It is not a mirror of the past, but a map for the future. And today, as I stand before you, I can say that we are on the brink of the next great collapse in cost.

Not in the laboratories of science, but in the studios of storytelling. Not in the code of the software we write, but in the code of human imagination. Because the next great unlocking of human potential will not come from what we discover; it will come from what we dare to create. And it will happen right here in the world of cinema, where stories will no longer be bound by budgets but bound by the limits of human creativity.

Over the next decade, expect we will witness a massive shift with the cost of cinematic creation collapsing by 70 to 80%. What took years and millions of dollars will be achieved in days and just thousands of dollars.

The wall between creative imagination and final execution will not just narrow; it will disappear. And as it does, a new creative age will rise, an age where every creator will have access to tools once locked behind the walls of the giant companies.

Every storyteller will become his own studio. And just as the genome unlocked life and sunlight unlocked energy, AI will unlock imagination. "Isliye takneeq ki taqat se ab Kalpana ko pankh lagao

Jo Socha hai mann me use parde par sach kar dikhao"

My dear friends, let me now paint a picture of what I believe the coming decade could look like for the world of Cinema, not as a fantasy but as an inevitable reality.

First: We will move to a world of Instant Global Releases. Imagine waking up in the morning with a story idea and by nightfall, releasing a full length feature film instantly translated into every language, customized for each viewer's culture, and streamed simultaneously to every continent. In a single day, your imagination can travel farther than any studio ever dreamed possible.

Second: AI Powered Music. Singers and music directors will increasingly become redundant as you compose your film's music in minutes across cultures and languages. No longer will you need to wait for orchestras or recording schedules.

Third: Real Time Storytelling. Your scripts will be permanently dynamic. They will rewrite themselves, adapting to live audience reactions, global viewership data, and your evolving ideas. The film will become a living entity, transforming continuously with every heartbeat of its audience.

Fourth: Hyper Personalized Experiences. Imagine a historical epic where the hero's face and voice are modelled on the viewer. Each person sees a version of the story that mirrors their own identity, making the film feel deeply personal and totally immersive.

Fifth: Emergence of Creator and AI Collaboration Studios. Your teams will expand beyond humans. You will co create with AI directors, editors, and designers, thus freeing you to focus on vision and meaning while the algorithms handle the details of production.

Sixth: The Immortal Actors. Given the rapid advances in AI generated images and voice, digital replicas of actors are set to become the industry norm. This shift will not only redefine ownership structures but also create a new market for “evergreen” actors spanning multiple generations.

And finally: The Movie as a Gateway to Commerce. Soon, every item you see in the film, be it a jacket you like or a vacation trip you want to take, both will be purchasable with a click. Your revenue model will transform movies into an ecosystem of commerce.

My young student friends, this is the extraordinary world you are stepping into, a world where you will be the creators of tomorrow. Armed with your imagination and amplified by AI, you will have unprecedented power to shape Minds, Movements, and Meaning.

But with this power will come a significant responsibility. Because when intelligence can mimic emotion and algorithms can shape meaning, who will guard the truth? Who will ensure Bharat’s message is carried to the world? That duty, that calling, must be yours. And I stand before you as a fellow citizen with immense faith that your generation will make it happen. You are the first generation to be entrusted with both the melodies of our heritage and the codes of the future.

They have now converged. This is real power. And with this power will come duty. To tell not just any story, but the actual story of Bharat’s greatness.

And so, let this be your promise: Never, never again will the story of any Indian Mahatma be written through the lens of a foreigner.

Never, never again will our sorrow of slums be sold as a spectacle to foreign markets.

"Kaafi dekh liya humne pardesi aankhon ka rang

Ab likhenge apni dastan apne hee dhang"

And from this soil, you will be the patriots who will write our stories, spread our message, and honour our struggle. You will show the world what Bharat means and what it means to be Bharatiya.

So, my young friends: May your generation be the one that gave Bharat her voice back. May your generation be the one that gave Bharat her song back.

May your generation be the one that gave Bharat her stories back. And may the halls of Whistling Woods forever echo with the whistle of Bharat’s youth: a whistle that speaks with truth, that sings with pride, and that reminds the world of our timeless philosophy...

Duniya gumrah kare agar, tu rah sach ki chunte rehna Satyamev Jayate tera deep, isi taakat se itihaas Rachna! Satyamev Jayate, my dear friends. May Truth Alone Prevail. Jai Hind.

Disclaimer: NDTV Profit is a subsidiary of AMG Media Networks Limited, an Adani Group Company.