India's AI Race: Reinventing Tech Leadership for Socio-Economic Impact

"India is at a pivotal point in its evolution as a technology hub," Govil said in an interview with IANS ahead of the 'India AI Impact Summit 2026' in New Delhi next week.

"For the last almost three decades, India led the tech services industry globally," he noted. But with the rise of automation and artificial intelligence, "the fundamental premise on which the services industry was built, which was a labour arbitrage, has been eroding."

AI, he said, is "a big leveller," where "geography and location and labour costs doesn't matter as much as it did."

That makes the moment critical for New Delhi.

"For India, this is a very important moment because it is announcing to the world that not only is India investing in AI, but is probably going to be where AI will find its true socio-economic impact," said Govil, also the Founding Chair, US India Chamber of Commerce, Austin, Texas.

He argued that AI can "hypercharge Indian businesses" while helping the country "leapfrog through all the issues in various sectors," including education, healthcare, and energy.

Globally, the competition is intensifying.

"There is a race going on. It is the modern version of the arms race or the nuclear race. This is the AI race," Govil said.

Countries are investing "hundreds of billions of dollars to build the necessary infrastructure to be able to power AI," he said.

He stressed the importance of sovereign capabilities. "The emergence of sovereign AI, sovereign LLMs, is important because it allows countries to safeguard their own interests," Govil said.

While much of the foundational model development has taken place in North America, he said India must strengthen infrastructure, talent, and use cases to stay competitive.

"Talent is an area where India, of course, has not had any shortage when it comes to technology," he said. But in AI, "the type of talent, the type of skills needed, have shifted."

Engineers now "don't even need to write software code," he said, but must ensure AI-generated outputs "solve the real business problems and are optimized and error-free."

Govil believes India's real strength lies in scale.

"India is the ultimate laboratory to try out different technologies to solve real-world problems at scale and at the lowest cost," he said.

He said India must "reinvent how AI is being leveraged" to make it "more efficient in terms of power usage and cost of compute" while benefiting "the population at large."

On collaboration with the United States, Govil said American firms already play a significant role.

"A lot of the AI models that are being adopted in India" are coming from U.S. companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft, he said.

But deeper cooperation will be needed, especially on standards and safeguards. "There's going to be a need for safeguards," he said, to ensure AI "cannot be hijacked by bad users."

He pointed to "exchange of know-how knowledge, talent between US and India" and investments in infrastructure and application development.

At the same time, he made clear that "I don't think India is going to be reliant on the US or any other country for its AI future."

Govil also highlighted the role of the Indian diaspora. "I'm seeing sort of this second wave of Indian Americans heading back to India," he said, both to tap into the market opportunity and "to give back to their nation."

That shift, he said, "is only going to amplify," with more entrepreneurs and investors driving "the next phase of growth."

- IANS