India's AI Summit Shifts Focus From Fear to Opportunity, Says Rubrik CEO

Sinha told IANS in an exclusive interview that the timing of the summit "could not be better," arguing that India is now examining artificial intelligence across "the different layers of the stack, starting from the energy layer all the way to the agents and how agents will get deployed."

But, he stressed, "AI is going to be all about solution, not just the AI technology, because it has to go into business processes and line of business."

That focus on application, rather than abstract capability, underpins India's pitch at the summit, he said. "India has really the opportunity to be the AI orchestration layer to deliver agent work to different businesses that Indian companies are already partnering with," Sinha said, citing the country's technology workforce and what he described as "about a hundred billion investments" in infrastructure spanning energy, computing and partnerships.

The New Delhi meeting follows earlier global AI summits in the United Kingdom, South Korea and France, gatherings that Sinha said were largely framed around the dangers of the technology. "A lot of early AI summits were about the risk of AI," he said. "This Indian AI summit is about the opportunity and the impact of AI."

In his view, that shift in tone is overdue. "These technologies should be seen as opportunities for progress, opportunity for upliftment, opportunity for abundance," Sinha said, while acknowledging that "AI is a hundred times more opportunities and lots of risk." Managing that risk, he added, must follow, not precede, a serious attempt to deploy the technology at scale.

Sinha repeatedly returned to India's experience with digital transformation as a template for what AI could achieve. Over two decades, he said, the country saw mobile phones, internet services, digital payments and identity systems spread rapidly.

"India has been a pioneer in these spaces," he said. If artificial intelligence follows a similar path, "it really bridges the knowledge gap for the Indian population and enables them to actually use technology for their own upliftment."

He pointed to the potential for AI to lower the cost of goods and services, creating what he described as "a potential deflationary impact" that could "help uplift Indian masses." Yet he warned that outcomes are not guaranteed.

"AI should not create biased results," he said. "AI systems should be fair," and the workforce must be trained so that white-collar jobs "increase the productivity" rather than disappear.

On employment, Sinha dismissed the more dire predictions. "I personally feel that the AI related job worries are a little bit overinflated," he said, arguing that new categories of work will emerge, just as they did in earlier technological shifts.

He described the current transition as a move toward what he called "intuition labor," following earlier eras of agricultural, industrial and knowledge work. "There will be entrepreneurship, job proliferation, business creation at unprecedented speed," he said.

Sinha drew a sharp distinction between building AI models and applying them. The former, he said, requires a small pool of highly specialized engineers. The latter does not. "For every model engineer, my suspicion is that you'll have 10,000 applied AI engineering work," he said, describing opportunities in agent orchestration, business-process transformation and enterprise deployment.

Globally, he said, the United States remains "farthest ahead" in core model innovation, with China behind it. India, by contrast, is focusing on applied AI, a choice he said aligns with its role serving global businesses.

Still, he welcomed New Delhi's push into semiconductor manufacturing, GPUs and data centers, calling government investments "very positive steps" that allow India "to be in the business of generating intelligence."

Asked what policymakers should do next, Sinha praised the government's pace. "They have been quick to move," he said, citing public-private partnerships, budget provisions and tax breaks for data centers. Continued investment, global outreach and summits like this one, he added, would help showcase "India supplying their applied AI to the rest of the world."

U.S. companies, he said, are drawn by India's scale and growth. "India is a large market, the biggest population, and everybody sees India as the next big large economy," Sinha said, describing recent investments as a way to build products locally and deliver them "at the best possible prices to the Indian market."

The summit's agenda, he said, will revolve around "people, planet and progress," with discussions on job retraining, energy demands and inclusive growth. "How do you ensure that AI creates inclusive progress?" he asked. "How do you ensure that the global south is not left behind?"

Rubrik, a data security and cyber resilience company, plans no splashy announcements but will "continue to double down on India," Sinha said, aiming to help governments and businesses "enjoy the benefit of AI without the risk." He summed up the company's approach bluntly: "Unleash agents but not risk."

Looking beyond economics, Sinha highlighted healthcare and education as the most transformative public-sector uses. In a country as large as India, he said, AI could help deliver consistent diagnostics, preventive care and training "in a secure way, in a trusted way." The worst-case scenario, he warned, would be a collapse of trust if biased outcomes undermine public confidence.

He extended that argument to the media, suggesting that while AI will flood the world with information, it cannot replace journalism's role in explanation. "What it doesn't do is the context," he said. "Why is this happening will be provided by news media."

The AI Impact Summit, to be held in New Delhi, is expected to bring together governments, technology companies and researchers from across the world at a moment when India is positioning itself as a central player in applied artificial intelligence, even as global debates continue over regulation, energy use and the social consequences of rapid adoption.

- IANS