India AI: Beyond the Applause, Where Do We Really Stand

The applause was deafening.

Screens glowed with GPU counts. Words like Sovereign AI, AI Factories, and National Scale drifted confidently across the panels. There was a palpable pride in the room—and rightly so. But as I sat there listening, I found myself thinking less about what was being celebrated and more about what remains unresolved.

Applause is easy. Execution is not.

Somewhere between the ambition of the stage and the reality of the shop floor lies the question that actually matters: Beyond the standing ovation, where do we actually stand?

Momentum is Real. Direction is Unclear.

Let’s be clear: India is not "late" to AI. We possess what most nations envy: Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) at a population scale, immense talent, and clear political intent.

We are building GPU clusters. We are talking about indigenous compute. As a staunch believer in the Make in India hardware ecosystem, I see this as more than just industry—it is strategic insulation. Compute sovereignty isn't a luxury; it’s the floor. Building infrastructure locally isn't symbolism; it’s the only way to control our technological destiny.

Are We Building Engines—or Just Renting Them?

Much of the current excitement circles around hardware:

Who has the GPUs?

How many Petaflops?

Whose cluster is bigger?

These are the right metrics for a start, but the wrong metrics for leadership. True sovereignty isn't just hosting someone else’s model on a local rack. It’s about owning the entire stack: orchestration, energy resilience, and optimization. The Insight: Make in India cannot stop at the rack. It must extend to the software stacks and security layers that make the hardware hum.

From Model Size to Market Maturity

At summits, the gravity always pulls toward model size. Bigger. Faster. More languages. But the question I keep asking is: How many Indian enterprises are truly AI-ready?

Not piloting. Not "exploring." Deploying.

How many banks have AI fully baked into credit risk workflows?

How many factories rely on predictive maintenance every single shift?

How many government departments have operational AI reducing citizen friction?

AI only becomes meaningful when it "disappears" into the process. We are world-class at Proof of Concepts (PoCs). We must now become world-class at Production.

The Real Advantage We Don’t Fully Use

India’s greatest asset isn’t a specific model; it’s our data footprint. UPI transactions, multilingual nuances, and diverse behavioral data are our "oil."

But scale without structure is just noise. Data governance, curation, and standardization are less glamorous than unboxing a new GPU, but they determine whether our AI is intelligent by design or accidental by data. Sovereign AI: A Word We Must Use Carefully

Sovereignty isn't isolation. It isn’t replacing global brands with domestic slogans. It is owning enough of the stack—Compute, Data, Security, and Deployment—to avoid strategic dependency. Resilience is built in the lab and the factory, not declared at a press conference.

Talent: Scale vs. Depth

We produce extraordinary engineers, but frontier AI demands more than engineering volume. It requires "Patient Capital"—investors willing to fund long-horizon research and deep model experimentation.

The question for our ecosystem is simple: Are we building the operators of AI, or the originators? Both are needed, but only one writes the global rules.

So, Where Do We Stand?

India is not behind, but we are not yet ahead. We are at a pivot.

The next decade will not reward announcements or headline numbers. It will reward:

Depth over Display

Deployment over Demos

Ecosystems over Isolated Wins

The applause at the summit was deserved. But applause is a moment. The real work is quiet, technical, and relentless. And it starts now.

A Personal Reflection

Walking out of the summit, I felt two things at once: Optimism, because India is finally serious, and Responsibility, because seriousness must translate into execution.

The question is no longer whether India will participate. The question is whether we will build foundations strong enough to shape the rules—not just follow them.