India’s national AI push is moving into its 2nd year, with sovereign models finally close to launch and early momentum led by Sarvam, followed by a wider group of 12 firms working across language, speech and vision.
The focus is now shifting from development to relevance. While these homegrown models are advancing, most global enterprises operating in India continue to rely on established platforms such as GPT, Claude and Gemini. This raises a central question for the IndiaAI mission. Can sovereignty convert into real enterprise adoption, or will it remain a parallel effort designed more for policy needs than production use.
Founders are open about the challenge. CoRover.ai CEO Ankush Sabharwal says enterprises do not buy AI out of patriotism but out of necessity, pointing out that there is no mandate forcing companies to adopt sovereign models. The decision, he notes, is driven purely by business value.
Others argue that Indian models are competing on a different axis. RevRag.AI founder Ashutosh Prakash Singh says these systems are not trying to win on scale, but on fit. He highlights strengths such as deep multilingual support, closer regulatory alignment and lower costs as areas where domestic models can stand out.
Some players are also aiming big on capability. BharatGPT, incubated at IIT Bombay, has announced plans for a 1 trillion parameter model and is working with global partners including IBM and NVIDIA. The move signals that sovereignty does not mean working in isolation, but building with global collaboration.
The broader debate is about ambition and quality. gnani.ai CEO Ganesh Gopalan believes India’s linguistic diversity can become a gateway to globally competitive AI. Jaspreet Bindra, however, cautions that the idea of sovereignty should never be used to justify lower standards or weaker performance.
Soket AI Labs CEO Abhishek Upperwal stresses that India will only gain frontier AI capability by building and learning through execution, rather than waiting for maturity to arrive from elsewhere. As Vikas Singh of Turinton sums it up, the real measure of success is simple. Does it solve the business problem better.
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