India’s 2025 AI boom brings scale, but not yet a breakthrough

The Business Standard piece captures something important: India’s AI story in 2025 has been less about bleeding‑edge models and more about whether existing systems can deliver operational value at scale. Banks, IT outsourcers and telcos have rolled out copilots, analytics and automation, but many projects are still marooned in pilot purgatory or siloed inside innovation teams. It’s a reminder that capability breakthroughs in San Francisco or London don’t automatically translate into productivity gains in Mumbai or Chennai.

From an AGI lens, India is one of the few markets with the talent base, data volumes and cost pressures to turn general‑purpose models into massive, domain‑specialized agents—if organizational and infra bottlenecks can be cleared. The article’s focus on sovereign AI and data localization is also telling: Indian policymakers want domestic control over training data and core models, not just API access to Western systems.

If 2026 really does become the year when pilots cross into core workflows at scale, India could quickly become one of the most important real‑world testbeds for near‑AGI behavior in finance, customer support and public services. But that will depend less on another model release and more on plumbing—data quality, integration into legacy systems and robust governance frameworks that let enterprises take real bets.