India's artificial intelligence ambitions are no longer confined to the corner offices of large corporations. They are reaching into rural healthcare, vernacular financial services, and the smartphones of first-generation internet users.
Purushothaman KG, Partner and Head of Technology Transformation and AI at KPMG India, has been watching this shift closely. Speaking on the sidelines of the Summit, he was measured but unambiguous, India is at an inflection point, and the evidence is visible on the ground.
"What this summit has been quite a revelation on is how startups, individuals, software developers, innovators at a ground-root level have started adopting AI at scale. Not just enterprise-grade use cases, but those that could create genuine social impact," he says.
Beyond The Boardroom
The conversation around AI in India has been dominated by large enterprises and government-backed digital infrastructure projects. What Purushothaman and KPMG are now tracking is something more diffuse and, arguably, more significant: the democratisation of AI through smartphone penetration.
India's UPI-powered financial inclusion story offers the clearest precedent. A payments ecosystem that was once dismissed as too ambitious for a cash-dependent economy now processes billions of transactions monthly, reaching users who had never held a bank account. Purushothaman sees AI following an identical trajectory.
"The digital payment ecosystem is a perfect example of how inclusion has been driven responsibly at a ground-root level. It made technology accessible to the common man on a handset. AI will be successful in India, more so because of smartphone proliferation."
Healthcare, transportation, and logistics are the sectors he expects to feel the impact most acutely in the near term. Climate resilience and urban mobility are not far behind.
The Infrastructure Equation
KPMG recently released its AI for Bharat report which attempts to map the full architecture of India's AI economy: government incentive programmes, enterprise adoption curves, data centre buildout, and the policy scaffolding being constructed around all of it.
One element Purushothaman flagged with particular emphasis is the emerging geopolitical and commercial alignment that is beginning to reduce the cost of deploying AI infrastructure in India. Bilateral agreements, including those with the United States, he suggested, will not only bring infrastructure within reach but will also make India an attractive destination for global organisations looking to run compliant, sovereign AI workloads.
"The cost of deploying AI will reduce, and hence the number of use cases and the scale will dramatically go up. We have been talking about edge data centres to make content available with a superior experience. It will multiply manifold with better access to infrastructure going forward," he asserts.
Responsibility As Strategy
On the question of digital sovereignty, Purushothaman believes it has been misunderstood as a narrow regulatory concern. "Digital sovereignty expands beyond just data and privacy. It also talks about how India is ready — and how the infrastructure being deployed here will be clearly ready for any organisation around the world to bring their applications into India," he notes.
In other words, sovereignty and openness are not in contradiction. The argument KPMG is making and that the government appears to be accepting is that a well-governed, well-infrastructured India is more attractive to global AI investment, not less.
India has not yet released a comprehensive AI-specific regulatory framework to match its recently enacted data privacy legislation, but the direction of travel seems clear: policy that enables rather than restricts, while building in accountability at the application layer.
Three Takeaways, One Narrative
When asked to distil his summit experience, Purushothaman offered three observations that, taken together, sketch the contours of where India's AI economy is heading.
First, the startup ecosystem has matured faster than most anticipated, producing use cases that are globally competitive, not just locally relevant. Second, the government has moved from cheerleader to active collaborator, deepening ties with other nations and creating conditions for private-sector scale. Third, and perhaps most importantly, India is proving that speed and responsibility are not mutually exclusive.
"India has successfully driven AI adoption, but India has also been responsible in driving policies," he concludes. |
