Amit Sheth notes the US’s dominance in frontier AI and consumer models, while China’s sovereignty-focused investments are narrowing performance gaps, offering a context for India’s strategic path.

India will regulate AI in a balanced, pragmatic way that protects users while fostering innovation, according to Amit Sheth of the Indian AI Research Organisation.

The opportunity for India lies in building industry- and domain-specific AI across healthcare, agriculture, finance, and governance, rather than chasing large consumer models.

IAIRO aims to strengthen India’s deep AI talent pipeline, shifting from services-oriented engineering toward frontier research, system building, and IP creation to become a future AI-driven product nation.

Early use cases emphasize education, healthcare, agriculture, climate, manufacturing, and finance, prioritizing quality, trust, and applicability over generic large language models.

These specialized SLMs will become core IP for startups and enterprises, featuring indigenous pre-training, post-training, and knowledge-graph components to boost sovereignty and reliability.

Globally, the US leads in frontier AI and consumer-focused models with strong capital markets, while China pursues sovereign AI through domestic investment in infrastructure, design, and talent.

India positions itself differently—leveraging sector-specific strengths to compete by applying AI where it matters most for everyday use and industry needs.

IAIRO’s mix of academics, startup founders, and veterans from Amazon, Meta, Apple, Netflix, and Snap highlights a broad, ecosystem-oriented effort.

IAIRO is building compact, task-specific models on the IndiaAI infrastructure to generate indigenous IP and reliable AI solutions for mission-critical needs.

The IndiaAI infrastructure will enable frugal, rapidly deployable, industry- and task-specific models rather than broad, generic LLMs.