India is set to become a global leader in AI innovation, particularly in multilingual solutions, says Google Cloud India's Sashikumar Sreedharan. He highlights India's unique diversity and the shift from AI experimentation to real business outcomes.
India is well-positioned to become a global leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation, particularly in multilingual and multimodal AI solutions with worldwide relevance, according to Sashikumar Sreedharan, Managing Director of Google Cloud India. Speaking to ANI on the sidelines of the Leaders Connect India 2026 event, Sreedharan said India's linguistic diversity, scale, and rapidly evolving digital ecosystem give the country a unique edge in the global AI race.
"India is well-positioned to become a global leader in AI innovation, especially in multilingual and multimodal AI solutions with worldwide relevance," Sreedharan said. He added, "The voice, video, vernacular dimension alone is a massive opportunity, the scale, the linguistic diversity, the volume of interactions that need to happen across languages and modalities. That is a problem India will solve better than anyone, and the solutions built here will have global relevance."
Shift From Experimentation to Business Value
Sreedharan said AI adoption in India has now moved beyond experimentation and pilot projects, with companies increasingly focused on measurable business outcomes and returns on investment. "The single biggest shift we are seeing is the move from experimentation to real business outcomes," he said. "Boardrooms are no longer asking what a Large Language Model (LLM) can do. They are asking for a clear path to business value, either as cost reduction or net new revenue."
According to him, agentic AI, which enables autonomous, multi-step enterprise processes, is emerging as the next major phase of AI adoption across industries. "The second major trend is the rise of agentic AI, moving from simple prompt-based insights to multistep, autonomous enterprise processes that execute end to end," he said.
BFSI and IT Services Lead AI Adoption
Sreedharan noted that the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector and IT-enabled services are currently leading AI-driven transformation in India. "In financial services, customer care, inbound and outbound operations, and lead generation are already being transformed," he said. "There are also highly nuanced verticals like health insurance claims management, which involves reading prescriptions, validating empanelments, checking entitlements and making approval decisions with human-in-the-loop escalations."
He added that IT services companies are increasingly deploying agentic AI for internal functions such as resource management, delivery management, project profitability and skills databases across large employee bases.
Focus on Data Security and Modern Infrastructure
On data security and responsible AI adoption, Sreedharan said enterprises no longer need to relocate sensitive data to leverage AI capabilities. "We tell enterprises: don't move your data. Data lives where it is, on-prem, in AWS, in Azure, wherever. Our AI instrumentation picks it up, indexes it and makes sense of it without disruption," he said.
He also highlighted the importance of cloud infrastructure and trusted data systems in supporting India's AI ambitions. "AI needs modern data, clean, governed, accessible, trusted data, as its base. Without that, models like Gemini cannot deliver meaningful enterprise insights," he said, while referring to Google Cloud's investment in Visakhapatnam as part of its long-term commitment to India.
Startups Outpacing Traditional Enterprises
Sreedharan further told ANI that the startups and digital-native companies are adopting generative AI faster than traditional enterprises because of their agility and absence of legacy technology systems. Traditional firms, he added, are now trying to replicate that speed by creating dedicated AI-focused teams and innovation layers. (ANI)
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Asianet Newsable English staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)