Tata Motors enters BaaS space with Punch.ev in quest for ICE-EV price parity| Business News
Tata Motors PV Ltd. has launched the updated Punch.ev, offering battery-as-a-service for the first time, as India’s largest EV maker eyes price parity with ICE equivalents. Tata Motors PV Managing Director Shailesh Chandra with the updated Punch.ev at a launch event in Mumbai on Friday, 20 February 2026. (Handout) The sub-compact electric SUV is now available at an ex-showroom price of ₹9.69 lakh. The price goes down to ₹6.49 lakh under the BaaS financing model. The battery EMI is fixed at ₹2.6/km. “The new Punch.ev, makes electric mobility truly accessible, practical and worry free for every household,” Shailesh Chandra, managing director of Tata Motors PV and Tata Passenger Electric Mobility Ltd., said in a statement. According to him, the Punch.ev resolves the core concerns that have held consumers back from choosing an entry-level EV as their primary car. Punch.ev: Battery Packs and Range The Punch.ev is available in three distinct personas: Smart, Adventure, and Empowered. Buyers can select between two battery configurations: a standard 30 kWh option and a larger 40 kWh lithium-iron phosphate prismatic cell pack. The 40 kWh variant delivers an ARAI-certified range of 468 km and an estimated real-world range of approximately 355 km, positioning it for both urban commute and short intercity trips. Pricing tops out at ₹12.59 lakh for the Empowered +S trim equipped with the 40 kWh battery. The Punch.ev supports fast-charging to replenish the battery from 20% to 80% in 26 minutes. A 15-minute top-up can add up to 135 km of real-world range. The 40 kWh variant is backed by a lifetime high-voltage battery warranty covering unlimited kilometres for the first owner over a fifteen-year period. Punch.ev: The BaaS offering Tata Motors PV’s BaaS dual-loan finance option separates the vehicle’s base cost from battery utilisation. The advertised BaaS pricing is applicable to the Smart 30 kWh trim and assumes a daily usage of 60 km, excluding charging costs. The plan also includes assured buyback options, ranging from 40% buyback after five years to 60% after three years. With the Punch.ev, Tata Motors joins the likes of JSW MG Motor India Pvt. Ltd. and Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. in offering BaaS with its electric cars. The Maruti Suzuki eVitara is available at a starting price of ₹10.99 lakh, with BaaS EMI set at ₹3.99/km. The MG cars — Comet EV, Windsor EV and ZS EV — have a BaaS EMI ranging from ₹2.5/km to ₹4.5/km. Charging Infra, Service Network The launch of the Punch.ev coincides with Tata Motors PV’s broader push to solidify its charging ecosystem. The company’s network currently includes 2.3 lakh charging points across 1,500 Indian cities, aggregating more than 30,000 public chargers from over 30 operators. TATA.ev is also expanding its proprietary superfast charging network, aiming to grow its footprint of more than 450 points on 80 highways to 800 charging points by the end of FY26.
Owen Larter of Google DeepMind| Business News
At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a laboratory breakthrough but a geopolitical and developmental force, Google DeepMind is recalibrating how it works with governments. This week, they announced its National Partnerships for AI with the Indian government, which includes working with the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) to make its scientific AI models more accessible, as well as supporting IIT-Bombay with a grant of $50,000 to use Gemma to process Indic language health governance and policy documents to build a novel ‘India-Centric Trait Database’. Owen Larter, senior director and head of frontier policy and public affairs at Google DeepMind. (Official image) For Owen Larter, who is senior director and head of frontier policy and public affairs at Google DeepMind, this is not merely an expansion in a large market, but reflects a view that India’s position is uniquely catalytic, with strong ties to the developing world. It must play a role in shaping how AI benefits are distributed more equitably across geographies. Yet, Larter argues the responsibility to ensure AI works safely for everyone also lies with companies building frontier systems, who must actively ensure governments understand what these technologies can do. Transparency, he suggests, is a prerequisite for effective regulation. Edited excerpts: Q. Google DeepMind has been vocal about extreme risks from advanced AI. How do you prioritise near-term harms versus longer-term existential concerns in your policy work? Owen Larter: This is a really important conversation, and obviously our mission is to develop advanced AI and put it into the world responsibly. We’re excited about how people are using this technology, such as leading Indian scientists using AlphaFold to develop new types of cancer therapies. If we’re going to continue to build progress in this, we need to make sure this technology is trustworthy and we need to continue to build out governance frameworks. There is a little bit of a danger in segmenting different risks that we need to address. This is going to be a sort of continuous journey, to come up with durable frameworks. There are a few principles that we must work to. We need to continue to build a really solid scientific understanding of the technology, of what it can do, its capabilities, and its limitations. It’s critical to then work with partners to understand the impact this technology will have when it’s used in the real world, and of testing for mitigation. That’s really an approach that we need to apply across whatever the set of risks is, whether it’s protecting child safety or making sure that our systems are useful in different languages, through to critical risks of advanced frontier systems developing capabilities that could be misused by bad actors to perpetrate a cyberattack or create a biological weapon. DeepMind has the frontier safety framework since 2024, which we iterate over time. This will not be a static issue. AI governance is never going to be a solved problem, it is an ongoing journey. Q. We are witnessing differing regulatory philosophies emerging globally? Is convergence desirable, or should we expect regulatory pluralism? Owen Larter: I think there’s certainly convergence in certain places. All of these different regulatory philosophies are trying to do the same thing; every country wants to use AI across their economies. But there are risks that need to be understood and addressed. We are seeing some different approaches, where the EU has moved first and a little bit further than other jurisdictions. The US is taking a slightly different approach, and there are some state regulations addressing frontier governance in California and New York now. That will continue to develop. We want to lean in and be helpful to governments worldwide, to help them understand the technology. It’s a responsibility on our part to share information around what it can do today and where it’s going. One bit of the conversation that has been really heartening this week is the attention to the importance of developing standardised best practises for testing of systems for risks, and applying mitigation before a system goes into the world. Q. The AI Safety Summit series represents international coordination. What mechanisms are proving most effective in translating high-level commitments into policy action? Owen Larter: The India AI Impact Summit in particular has been really important in shining light on some important issues that haven’t been addressed as much in previous summits, particularly the importance of spreading access and opportunity with AI and making sure that you’re putting it into the hands of people. The multilingual discussions that have happened are essential. It’s something that we’re leaning into and trying to do more of, with our grant for IIT-Bombay. Regular discussion at a global level, is really important. I’m really pleased this will be carried forward in Switzerland and then the UAE. Q. Given India’s strengths in digital public infrastructure and its scale of deployment, what unique contributions could it make to global AI governance discussions? Owen Larter: It’s been absolutely fundamental that as the technology matures, discussions around how to use it are maturing alongside. It’s great that this summit series is broadened out slightly. I think India is going to be absolutely foundational to how this technology is developed and used. It is clear that India is going to be an AI powerhouse within its own rights. That’s why we are continuing to continuing to invest here. Q. At what point does a model become ‘frontier’ for governance clarity? Owen Larter: We need to think about different types of systems, to advance understanding around how they work, and the risks. From a legal perspective, defining is important but is easy to caught up in the semantics. We think of frontier systems as being sort of the most advanced systems that exist at any one point. Of course, the frontier continues to advance, with systems becoming more capable. One of the reasons we’re interested in frontiers is, they may develop capabilities that could pose risks. Our framework is a
Exclusive | India must lead agentic payment regulation: Razorpay’s Rahul Kothari
Imagine asking an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant what looks an otherwise simple enough question, “what to order for dinner”, and seamlessly proceed to the “order is on the way” stage, within the same conversation. That’s the world of agentic AI payments that Razorpay, India’s largest payment aggregator, envisions. The fintech, at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, has announced agentic payments on Anthropic’s Claude. It is, as Rahul Kothari, who is chief operating officer at Razorpay tells HT, “commerce being re-architected”. Rahul Kothari, chief operating officer at Razorpay. (Official image) This is the coming together of Razorpay’s Agentic Payments feature, India’s UPI infrastructure led by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), and Claude’s conversational intelligence, in a medley hoping to turn everyday AI conversations into real, completed purchases. Alongside, Razorpay is also partnering with global agentic software creation platform Replit to help AI developers integrate monetisation options in apps they build. The Anthropic AI-led payments chapter comes a few months after Razorpay rolled out agentic payments on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well as connectors for Google Gemini. Kothari believes that in the new age of AI commerce, trust design is going to matter more. “We are moving towards a world where checkouts will become invisible, and therefore trust on payments will be important,” he says. Crucial to agentic payments aspirations is UPI Reserve Pay, a feature that allows users to reserve a set amount of money from their RuPay credit card, a bank account on UPI or a pre-sanctioned credit line, and make payments from that pool. Razorpay and Anthropic’s agentic commerce chapter presently has Zomato, Swiggy and Zepto as partner platforms. “UPI really is the secret weapon for agentic commerce too. It lets you block funds for an agent without having to share payment credentials. No other real-time payments or card system does this natively,” says Kothari. Razorpay is dominant in India’s online payment gateway space, with over 55% share. The AI chatbot, when asked more generic questions such as “order dinner for two under ₹800 from my favourite restaurant”, will be able to search options on Zomato and Swiggy, and complete payment post a user’s confirmation. Kothari insists the core thought behind integrating agentic payments to work with popular quick commerce and food delivery apps, is to redefine how intent becomes an economic action, in an envelope of familiarity. Regulatory conversation is inevitable The current payments systems are designed on one foundational assumption, that a human decided to make this payment. The liability frameworks, dispute mechanisms and fraud prevention all are based on this assumption. Agentic payments break this, entirely. Kothari points out that in previous months, their learnings about agentic payments trends points to a heartening trend — users don’t really fear making AI payments. But he draws a line in the sand. “They do fear losing control, and the challenge for us is to solve real time tracking, instant revocation and user-defined spend limits,” he says. When an AI books a flight for you and the airline charges twice, who is liable — you, the AI platform, the payment processor, or the airline? When there’s no checkout page, consent is legally undefined. When an AI misinterprets a user’s instructions and buys the wrong thing, is that a fraud dispute, a product dispute, or something the existing rule books simply don’t answer, for now? The question regulators will have to define with an answer at some stage is, when AI makes a transaction error, who is liable? “India is best positioned to lead here because the Reserve Bank of India and NPCI have always been innovation friendly. There must be guardrails. UPI was a regulatory innovation, and the same method is applied in the AI commerce as well,” Kothari says, before pointing out the complexity that “AI will keep evolving and you can’t really write rules for every AI agent”. “Regulators in India will take the lead in how governance is supposed to happen,” he hopes, suggesting mechanisms such as user based consent for payments above a certain value per transaction, ability to revoke a permission to pay, and liability change must be step based. India’s digital payments trajectory doesn’t need much in terms of an illustration for the uninitiated. NPCI official data indicates UPI transactions clocked ₹28.33 lakh crore in value and 21.7 billion in volume in January — highest monthly statistics for UPI. Alongside, India’s credit card spends at ₹2.12 lakh crore for 552 million transactions, just shy of the ₹2.17 lakh crore record set in September. For agentic payments to succeed, in terms of adoption, Kothari believes the payment infrastructure must be platform agnostic. “The AI layer, whether it is ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, is just the interface. The payment system has to work the same way regardless of which AI is on top,” he says. The term he uses is “non-negotiable”. Razorpay has maintained significant momentum in previous months, including receiving the Offline Payment Aggregator (PA-P) licence from RBI, for collecting in-store payments, last month.
AI advantage in the next few years, cannot just be the model: Shantanu Narayen| Business News
India must play a leadership role not just in what artificial intelligence (AI) models mean and how we think about data, privacy, security and trust, insists Shantanu Narayen, Chair and CEO, Adobe, at the India AI Impact Summit. In a fireside conversation with Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder and Chairman of Bharti Enterprises, Narayen noted with a sense of responsibility that companies such as Adobe help produce the “world’s content”, and therefore must take a lead in content authenticity initiatives. Shantanu Narayen, Chair and CEO,said Adobe is expanding the opportunity for creativity for millions of students across India. (Forbes website) Alongside, Adobe has announced that as a compliment to the Indian Government’s Create in India vision and measures proposed in the Union Budget 2026 focusing on the creation of two million jobs in the fields of Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics by the year 2030, the company is making an AI first offer with an industry endorsed curriculum, free for the 15,000 schools and 500 colleges that will have Content Creator Labs. This will include free access to its popular apps, Photoshop, Acrobat and Firefly AI for students in the country. “Adobe is expanding the opportunity for creativity for millions of students across India, empowering them with AI skills, further accelerating Prime Minister Modi’s vision,” says Narayen. The company insists they will remain a key partner in advancing the Government of India’s AI-led initiatives across creativity, human capital, and trust and safety in AI. This initiative, adobe insists, will provide students with tools focused on creativity, productivity and AI-powered skills, which are expected to be useful in key growth sectors such as graphic design, video and visual effects, animation, gaming, marketing, media, and e-commerce. To the question about whether leading AI companies work in a way that things remain controlled in terms of commercial usage and therefore revenues as well as market share, Narayen says the competition between commercial enterprises who want to keep information proprietary and those who don’t, is an “inevitable challenge”. Also Read: Tech Tonic | Telecom bundles, and the fine art of turning free into forever “One of the things we’ve always done is, everything that we do is open standards. The reason why PDF has been adopted so massively is because it was an open standard,” he points out, before adding, “But I think it’ll require companies and enterprises to behave differently and really recognise what is their sustainable advantage which cannot over time, be just the model. It has to be the use cases of what people are doing with that model.” Narayan insists India is better positioned than most countries in that regard. Frugal innovation is one of those things. “That’s our secret sauce, jugaad. I think it’s because we use jugaad. That’s the secret sauce and that’s how we’ve been able to succeed on the global stage,” he says. Adobe says free access to Firefly, Photoshop and Acrobat will be available to students of accredited higher education institutions across India, though specifics are awaited.
Mukesh Ambani promises ₹10 lakh crore to deliver a Jio moment for AI| Business News
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani has promised to deliver a Jio moment for AI in India, with an investment of up to ₹10 crore over the next seven years to build the AI ecosystem in the world’s most populous country. Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani. (Bloomberg) Jio Platforms with Reliance Industries will invest ₹10 lakh crore over the next seven years starting this year, the chairman of India’s biggest company said at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi on Thursday. “This isn’t speculative investment. It is not for chasing valuation. This is patient, disciplined nation-building capital.” The biggest constraint in AI is not scarcity of talent but high cost of compute, said Ambani. “Jio Intelligence will build India’s sovereign compute infrastructure.” This includes gigawatt-scale data centres. Reliance Jio connected India to the internet era, and it will now connect it with the AI era, Ambani said. “We will deliver intelligence to every citizen, every sector of the economy and every facet of the social development. Jio will do so with the same reliability, scale and extreme affordability that transformed connectivity.” The best of AI is yet to come and that AI can usher in an era of super abundance. The world, he said, stands at a fork over AI—one path leading to scarce, expensive artificial intelligence-controlled data, while the other ensures affordable and accessible AI.
Demis Hassabis sees AGI on the horizon in 5-8 years, as ‘we aren’t there yet’| Business News
Technology isn’t there yet in terms of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, but it’s certainly on the horizon, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at the India AI Summit in New Delhi on Wednesday. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. (Reuters) “We are going to enter a golden era for scientific discovery, almost a new era,” Hassabis, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking work on protein structure prediction using AI, said during a conversation with IIT Madras Professor B. Ravindran. As for AGI, “we are not there yet”. “There are still things that systems can’t do—things like continued learning still needs to happen,” Hassabis said. One of the biggest issues is consistency, long-term planning. “Systems today can get international Math Olympiad medals, but can still make mistakes in elementary math. (AI) is still jagged that way,” the DeepMind CEO said. “It’s been amazing to see the progress we have made in just over a decade. The threshold moment where AGI is on the horizon is 5-8 years,” he said.
India is a blueprint for democratising AI globally, Sundar Pichai says| Business News
India is a blueprint for democratising AI globally, Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai said on Wednesday, unveiling a plethora of Google AI initiatives to tap into the world’s largest internet population outside of China. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at a press conference in New Delhi on Wednesday, 18 February 2026. (Reuters) India is poised for an “extraordinary trajectory” in AI as the language ecosystem and digital infrastructure here make for a “powerful foundation for innovation”, Pichai said during a press conference in New Delhi on Wednesday, ahead of his session at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 later this week. To tap into that unrealised potential, Google made the following announcements for its AI ecosystem in India: The India-America Connect Initiative to deploy new subsea cables between the US, India, and the wider Global South. A partnership with Karma Yogi Bharat to support 2 crore public servants. Atal Tinkering Labs to introduce Google Gen AI tools to 10,000 schools. A $30-million AI for Science Impact Challenge to advance global research. A Google AI Professional Certificate Program in English and Hindi for students and early-career professionals. Google’s $15-billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam including a 1 GW AI data centre and new subsea cables. “AI has the biggest impact when developed and deployed with institutions that understand communities best,” Pichai said. “Google has full-stack connectivity in India, and I have never been more excited about the future we are building together.” Pichai, a graduate of IIT Kharagpur, believes that “AI is the biggest platform shift of our lifetime”. “It must work across languages and local contexts. It must deliver real-world benefits people can rely on. Trust grows when technology is transparent, responsible, and grounded in outcomes,” he said.
Sarvam rivals ChatGPT, Claude with AI models customised for India| Business News
Sarvam AI has unveiled an artificial-intelligence model that’s more tailored for India than the likes of ChatGPT and Claude. Sarvam AI co-founder Pratyush Kumar and Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the company’s pavilion at the India AI Summit in New Delhi on Monday, 16 February 2026. (PMO) The Bengaluru-based AI startup announced two models at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi—a showcase for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to make his country a leading player in the emerging technology. Sarvam’s models are built to be used through voice commands and are accessible through 22 Indian languages, which the company says will be a competitive advantage in the country of 1.45 billion where the vast majority can’t read, write or type in English. “Today we show we can bring our own AI to a billion Indians,” said Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar during an event in Delhi. Sarvam also offers what’s known as Agentic AI models that can carry out tasks like coding or meeting planning in large part autonomously and with minimal human intervention. The company says its agents could drive enterprise automation in one of the world’s fastest growing economies. The startup’s unveiling of India-specific models trained from scratch comes as the AI race between the US and China is intensifying. The government is funding AI accelerators and pushing model makers to launch services so the country, one of the largest reservoirs globally of technical talent, isn’t left behind. Sarvam has steep challenges in fending off global competitors. The startup has received more than $50 million in funding, including from Lightspeed Ventures LLC and Khosla Ventures, and was last valued at about $200 million. That’s tiny compared with Silicon Valley leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic PBC, last valued at $500 billion and $380 billion, respectively. It’s also small next to companies like Mistral AI, a French pioneer in the technology that is valued at $13.25 billion and is expanding in India with local languages. Sarvam touts its India-first approach and the security it offers by running its AI models from inside the country. The startup’s models are trained on trillions of Indian data sets, particularly those in Indian languages, making it suitable for real-time deployment at scale in the world’s most populous country not just in local languages but also mixed languages such as Hinglish. In recent benchmark tests, the startup said its models performed with superior accuracy on tasks like optical character recognition for Indian scripts. The Sarvam vision model achieved an accuracy of over 84% on document intelligence tasks, eclipsing global models hundreds of times larger in size. “Sovereignty matters much more in AI than building the biggest models,” said Sarvam’s other co-founder, Vivek Raghavan, at the same event. India is hosting dozens of leading global chief executives, AI founders, country leaders, researchers and policy experts this week as it attempts to position itself as an alternative to the US and China, by leading in “democratising AI” and taking a cost-efficient, language-diverse route. India’s digital infrastructure has relied on foreign technologies for decades so the launch of the Sarvam models is seen as a step toward developing a “sovereign AI” ecosystem within the country. Indian AI startups like Sarvam and BharatGen, which also released a series of India-made models this week, are looking to export their AI systems to other developing economies in the world where neither Chinese nor US models are favoured.
Sundar Pichai calls on PM Modi amid India AI Summit underway in Delhi| Business News
Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Wednesday met Prime Minister Narendra Modi here in the national capital. Pichai is here for the Global AI Impact Summit 2026 and will deliver the keynote address on February 20 at the summit. New Delhi, Feb 18 (ANI): Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in New Delhi on Wednesday. (DPR PMO/ANI Photo) (DPR PMO) Earlier upon arrival, in a post on X, CEO Pichai said, “Nice to be back in India for the AI Impact Summit – a very warm welcome as always and the papers looked great too.” The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is being held at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, it started on February 16 and will run up to February 20, 2026.T he Summit brought together government policymakers, industry AI experts, academicians, technology innovators and civil society from across the world at New Delhi to advance global discussions on artificial intelligence. The India AI Impact Summit, the first global AI summit to be hosted in the Global South, aims to reflect on the transformative potential of, AI aligning with the national vision of “Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya” (welfare for all, happiness for all) and global principle of AI for Humanity.
Microsoft warns about growing global AI divide as it pledges $50 billion for Global South| Business News
Microsoft is referencing the India AI Impact Summit within the broader context of the Global South while mentioning a $50 billion investment by the end of the decade. To support this point, the tech giant cites its latest AI Diffusion Report, which indicates that the Global North uses artificial intelligence (AI) twice as much as countries in the southern hemisphere. The planned investments hinge on a five-part programme, including building AI infrastructure, providing technology and skills for schools and nonprofits, developing multilingual and multicultural AI capabilities, and fostering local AI innovations that address community needs. Visitors at the Microsoft pavilion at the AI Impact Summit 2026 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on Tuesday. (Sanjeev Verma/HT Photo) “The India AI Impact Summit rightly placed this challenge at the centre of its agenda. For more than a century, unequal access to electricity exacerbated a growing economic gap between the Global North and South. Unless we act with urgency, a growing AI divide will perpetuate this disparity in the century ahead,” says Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft. This alarm about usage gaps underlines Microsoft’s messaging at the summit. Microsoft explicitly compares AI’s diffusion to electrification, one of the defining infrastructure expansions of the 20th century. Just as unequal access to electricity entrenched economic gaps between the North and South, Microsoft warns that unequal access to AI could cement a new form of structural inequality for decades to come. Comparisons between electricity and AI may be rhetorically effective messaging, but one is a utility while the other is not. The analogy also obscures key realities — AI access is not just a factor of infrastructure, but also of compute concentration. Secondly, most of today’s AI footprint is concentrated among a few companies across the largest models, AI chips, and cloud platforms. Critical infrastructure for the masses is unlikely to be proprietary. “We’re investing in AI infrastructure with sensitivity to digital sovereignty needs. We recognise that in a fragmented world, we must offer customers attractive choices for the use of our offerings. This includes sovereign controls in the public cloud, private sovereign offerings, and close collaboration with national partners,” says Natasha Crampton, Vice President and Chief Responsible AI Officer of Microsoft. Infrastructure access has historically been one of the most durable predictors of long-run economic development, and the barriers to AI adoption include reliable power, connectivity, compute, skilled workers, and software in local languages. The five-part program that Microsoft refers to includes $8 billion in annual investments in cloud and AI data centres, including in India; Microsoft Elevate for Educators training for 2 million teachers in India; investments in language data and model capabilities, including LINGUA Africa; and co-designing AI Trek for agriculture support in East Africa and South Asia. “As India’s guiding sutras for the AI Impact Summit recognise, AI must be applied to address pressing challenges in collaboration with people and organisations in the Global South. Microsoft’s increasing investments prioritise locally defined problems, locally grounded expertise, and real-world impact,” Smith notes. Microsoft’s commitment to invest $50 billion through to the end of the decade may sound transformative for the position of the Global South relative to the Global North, but these investments will primarily flow into data centres, proprietary AI tools, and enterprise partnerships — and the likelihood of platform lock-in on a regional scale remains a possibility. There will have to be greater investments in open model ecosystems, local model training capabilities, and sovereign AI. The skills and education pillar, anchored by the Microsoft Elevate program, targets 20 million AI credential earners by 2028, with a goal of equipping 20 million people in India with AI skills by 2030. Microsoft insists that accelerating the availability of AI, or diffusion, will require a clear understanding of where AI is being used and how, as well as the gaps that persist. “At 24 million, the Indian developer community is the second largest national community on GitHub, where developers learn about and collaborate with the world on AI. The Indian community is also the fastest growing among the top 30 largest economies, with growth at more than 26 percent each year since 2020 and a recent surge of over 36 percent in annual growth as of Q4 2025,” the company says. Microsoft’s contribution to the forthcoming World Bank Global AI Adoption Index, built partly on privacy-preserving signals from GitHub and Azure Foundry, creates a shared empirical baseline that could guide more targeted interventions across the sector. While the company commits to tracking AI diffusion, metrics for success on the $50 billion investment remain vague for now. Data centre investments are measurable, but any impact on actual human development outcomes is far harder to attribute. Secondly, while there seems to be a commitment to digital sovereignty, the prospect that national AI infrastructures will be built on a single hyperscaler’s cloud could create structural dependencies over time. This is also where questions about interoperability, reversibility, data localisation, and long-term pricing come into play.
