Will India Build Its Own AI or Just Use It? ft. Abhay Tandon
EPISODE NOTES
Will we be builders or just integrators? Infosys x Anthropic. Tata Group x OpenAI. HCLTech x Google Cloud. India is clearly moving fast in AI. But here’s the real question, "Will we be builders, or just integrators?" Global partnerships help enterprises adopt AI quickly. That’s smart. Speed matters. But partnership is not sovereignty. Sovereign AI means controlling our data, our compute, and the models built for Indian realities, so we’re not exposed to pricing shocks, policy shifts, or access restrictions. And we can’t ignore the gap: India spends just 0.6–0.7% of GDP on R&D. That’s not enough if we want frontier capability. So what’s our unfair advantage? UPI, Aadhaar, DigiLocker, ONDC, population-scale digital rails ready for AI deployment. The world’s most diverse data reality…