How AI And Open Innovation Can Unlock India's Potential

As ongoing advances in AI open up a world of possibilities, it’s exciting to see the massive opportunity it presents for India to bolster its growth journey.

India already has many of the ingredients in place to script an AI success story. As of early 2025, 1.12 billion cellular mobile connections were active in India, amounting to about 76.6% of the total population. India is set to have over 900 million internet users by 2025, as per a recent report from IAMAI and Kantar. Digital public infrastructure, including Aadhar, ONDC, UPI, provides a strong foundation that brings digital interactions and data into a unified form. 

India is already home to world-class AI engineering skills across Global Capability Centres and technology organisations, in addition to a large pool of engineering talent graduating from Indian colleges. 

More than any other country in the world, India has mind-boggling diversity not just in culture, language and geography but also in socio-economic strata. With the right digital fabric, AI unlocks the prospect of seamless communication and transactions across diverse populations. This spans across not just new-age citizen services but also B2B or B2C interactions. 

Coupled with the government’s ambitious Viksit Bharat vision to make India a completely developed nation by 2047, this sets the stage for AI to act as a catalyst for India to realise its massive aspirations. The timing is perfect, and the opportunity is massive.

Government and industry efforts to advance AI adoption in India have already created the necessary momentum. The India AI mission is a notable initiative with multiple pillars and a comprehensive approach. India's AI Supercomputer ‘AIRAWAT’, developed by C-DAC, has been ranked among the 100 most powerful supercomputers globally.

The AI Kosh platform, which provides a repository of datasets, models and use cases to enable AI innovation, is another useful initiative by India’s IT ministry. The India chapter of the AI Alliance, of which IBM is a founding partner, allows organisations to tap into global expertise and a collaborative network to tackle India-specific AI challenges in an open manner. 

However, the existing large language models available currently are not adequate for India’s unique and complex challenges. While building specific LLMs designed to address specific Indian challenges is a key step, there is also scope to train smaller, specialised models to meet specific objectives. For example, IBM worked with IIT Bombay and BharatGen, the first government-funded Multimodal LLM project focused on creating AI systems for Indian languages, to build an app for legal information in Indian languages. The app enables users to retrieve relevant parts of the Bharat Nyay Samhita based on issues that citizens might face, such as theft or a car accident, and is powered by a small model that was tuned using the open-source InstructLab for achieving high accuracy on BNS. A similar approach can potentially be used in any other domain or with any other dataset. 

Government and industry must now engage closely to overcome traditional siloes and work together to experiment and solve use cases. As AI is being built and adopted at speed, sharing of data sets, best practices and responsible AI practices, and open-source development across companies will be huge success factors. 

We must create an environment and framework to facilitate open collaboration wherever possible. Building a vibrant community to build AI for India in a transparent manner with a rich exchange of ideas will be crucial to shaping India’s AI journey. 

AI offers the promise of a positive economic and social impact, whether boosting the economy, increasing accessibility for all strata of society, creating new business ecosystems and opportunities. 

AI tools can not only substantially benefit governance practices but also broad base these technologies to currently underserved populations. In turn, it allows these populations to participate in the economy, access a variety of services and be empowered by knowledge. AI can also gain crucial insights into making government services more effective. 

The possibilities that AI offers are limitless, with use cases spanning citizen services, agri-management, knowledge sharing, and beyond.

At the same time, governments and organisations must put in place guardrails to harness the power of AI responsibly by creating open and transparent frameworks and tools. Since public sector agencies might lack the necessary expertise to determine and evaluate AI-related risks posed by models, these tools and frameworks can guide responsible AI adoption. 

Right now, India offers an opportunity like no other to tap into the promise of AI and make massive leaps in its growth journey. However, realising this growth will require the country to emphasise responsible AI frameworks and build an ecosystem for open collaboration.

Dr. Amith Singhee is director, IBM Research India, and CTO, IBM India and South Asia.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of NDTV Profit or its editorial team.