AI Must Empower Bharat, Not Just Boardrooms: Gautam Adani

Addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry's (CII) 'Annual Business Summit 2026' here, Gautam Adani said India must reject the idea that AI should primarily be used to eliminate workers and automate livelihoods.

"India must build AI as a force that expands productivity, creates jobs, empowers small enterprises and gives Indians the tools to compete globally," he said.

Drawing parallels with the transformational impact of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India's real-time digital payments platform, Gautam Adani said the country's most transformative technology revolutions succeed when they democratise access, expand trust and create opportunity at scale.

"UPI did not simply move money. It made small businesses visible, expanded trust and unlocked entirely new economic ecosystems," he said, adding that AI now presents India with a similar opportunity to create new industries, business models and employment ecosystems.

Gautam Adani said this opportunity can only be realised if India builds the full AI stack, including reliable energy, data centres, compute infrastructure, networks, applications and AI-integrated skilling ecosystems.

He also stressed that the intelligence age cannot be built only through chips, servers and algorithms, but equally through technicians, electricians, operators, cooling engineers and millions of skilled workers supporting the physical infrastructure behind the digital economy.

Warning against dependence on externally controlled digital ecosystems, Gautam Adani said: "Semiconductors have become instruments of statecraft. Data is being treated as a national resource. Clouds are being weaponised. Artificial Intelligence is being built behind the protective walls of data centres."

"For too long, digital worlds have been treated as places without a map," he said. "But in this fractured age, we must realise that data has a home and intelligence has a geography."

"India must not rent the infrastructure of its intelligence future. India must build it, power it and own it on its own soil."

Highlighting the scale of investments required, Gautam Adani referred to the Adani Group's $100 billion commitment across clean energy, digital infrastructure and data centres, alongside partnerships with Google and Microsoft to help build sovereign compute capacity on Indian soil.

Reflecting on his own journey, Gautam Adani said he had spent decades building in places many considered impossible, "from ports where there were only marshlands to power projects in regions that knew only darkness."

"The future does not arrive. It is built," he said.

Gautam Adani added that the next freedom struggle "will be fought in our grids, our data centres, our factories, our classrooms, our laboratories and our minds," and that freedom in the intelligence age will mean "the capability to power ourselves, compute for ourselves and dream for ourselves."

- IANS