Believe it or not, we are going through a civilizational change. The last time a change of this scale occurred was during the Industrial Revolution, which took two centuries to complete. But this one will be completed in two decades. According to Stanford AI Index, the cost of querying a GPT-3.5 level model was $20 per million tokens in 2022, falling to $0.07 by 2024. AI systems have improved their performance on ‘SWE-Bench’, a practical assessment of software engineering capability. In 2023, these systems were able to solve only 4.4% of the problems, in 2024 this figure will reach 71.7%. The McKinsey survey found that 88% of organizations had started using AI in at least one business function by 2025, compared to 55% two years earlier. Generative AI has also reached 53% of the population in three years. Intelligence today is cheaper, more available, and more widely usable than ever before. In view of this, every government, company and institution should rethink their assumptions. The real question for India today is whether we will be able to gain value from this change? India provides digital data, linguistic diversity and human context to global AI systems, but cutting-edge models are concentrated elsewhere. According to Stanford, about 90% of the leading AI models in 2024 will come from the US. In other words, India is helping to train the intelligence systems of the future, but without its own computing capacity, data architecture and model building capability, much of this value goes abroad. But India’s start is not weak. In fact, it has four advantages which very few countries can match. These are talent, openness of rules, infrastructure and energy. Talking about talent, India ranks first in terms of AI-skilled population. Our level of AI skills is 2.8 times higher than the global average, which is even ahead of the US and Germany. AI-talent in India has grown rapidly in the last decade. India is no longer just a country that exports engineers, but is also utilizing this talent at home. Global Capability Centres, startups and big companies are creating AI teams in the country. This is a sign that India is becoming one of the major operating centers of the AI era, not its back-office. Secondly, while many countries are already moving towards imposing strict controls on AI, India’s approach in this direction is perhaps the most visionary in the world. We have chosen light regulations. The RBI’s regulatory sandbox, the International Financial Services Center Authority (IFSCA) Innovation Framework and the principle-based guidelines of the India-AI Mission – all are designed with the same objective of building and then regulating what emerges. In rapidly changing sectors, overly stringent regulations can delay the adoption of technology, increase the cost of implementation, and discourage experimentation among smaller companies. Therefore, India’s policy of allowing innovation to develop before imposing blanket restrictions can give us a competitive edge. The third advantage is infrastructure. India is witnessing a major expansion in the infrastructure of the AI economy in the form of data centres, semiconductors, cloud capacity and high-performance computing. Investments worth $70 billion are underway in the data center sector alone and additional investments of $90 billion have been announced. Google’s $15 billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam, Microsoft’s $17.5 billion commitment in cloud and AI, Reliance’s plans for a multi-gigawatt data center in Jamnagar show that global capital is redefining India’s place. Data centers need reliable power around the clock. The country achieved a record 55.3 GW additional non-fossil energy capacity in 2025-26. We have also reduced solar energy tariffs in the last decade. With this, India has emerged as a place where AI infrastructure can be run through clean energy. Our level of AI skills is 2.8 times higher than the global average, which is even ahead of the US and Germany. AI-talent in India has grown rapidly in the last decade. India has also started using this talent at home. (These are the author’s own views)
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Amitabh Kant’s Column: These 4 factors can give us success in the field of AI
