Editorial: India’s AI hurdles

The challenge lies in scale: making AI affordable, multilingual, and accessible for a billion Indians

Overcoming infrastructure limitations, policy hurdles, and implementation challenges holds the key to India emerging as a dominant global player in the artificial intelligence sector. No doubt the country’s fundamentals and intent are strong, but it needs to plug the gaps to tap the full potential that the emerging sector offers. The Stanford’s AI Index 2025 report has acknowledged India’s rapid rise in the global AI ecosystem on the back of a fast-growing workforce and widespread adoption. At the same time, it has flagged certain glaring limitations in areas like private investment, patents, research citations, and globally recognised AI models. The country needs to quickly close these gaps to make AI the decisive lever to accelerate economic growth. Apart from infrastructure limitations like a lack of high-performance computing and semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, there are data challenges, AI talent gaps, and regulatory concerns surrounding data privacy. There is a need to step up strategic investments in infrastructure and develop robust ethical governance to scale AI solutions for India’s vast population and diverse socio-economic landscape. Lack of proper collaboration between industry and academic institutions is hindering AI education and innovation, thereby slowing the development of a skilled AI workforce. The significant risks associated with investing in AI adoption within India create a reluctance among companies to experiment and innovate. The Stanford report has pointed out that speeding up AI adoption across industries could contribute USD 1-1.4 trillion towards India’s 2035 goal of becoming a USD 8.3 trillion economy, including USD 500-600 billion from productivity gains and USD 280-475 billion from innovation.

India’s AI ecosystem is still evolving, but the foundation is strong. At the heart of the AI surge is its formidable IT services industry. Employing nearly 6 million professionals and contributing about 7 per cent to India’s GDP, this sector is a cornerstone of the nation’s economy. It accounts for nearly a quarter of the country’s total exports and has been quick to embrace AI and generative AI. India’s linguistic diversity poses both a challenge and an opportunity for the country to emerge as a major player. With over 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects, building foundational AI models that understand and generate Indian languages is critical. With a thriving IT services sector, rising data centre infrastructure, a buzzing start-up scene, and a growing base of homegrown AI models, the country is poised to become both a global delivery hub and a domestic innovation powerhouse. The challenge lies in scale: making AI affordable, multilingual, and accessible for a billion Indians. Though the country is stepping up its AI game through ‘IndiaAI Mission’, involving an investment of Rs 10,371 crore and plans to build a scalable GPU ecosystem to support AI innovation, the key question is whether we are moving fast enough in a world where AI is advancing at a lightning speed.

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