PwC India sees AI adding up to $150B for manufacturing MSMEs by 2035

This report is a reminder that the AI story in India won’t be written only by hyperscalers and unicorns. Manufacturing MSMEs are the backbone of the country’s industrial base, and PwC/ORF’s headline figure – up to roughly $150 billion in added value by 2035 – assumes wide adoption of quite practical AI: predictive maintenance on shopfloors, computer-vision quality control, AI‑enabled lending, multilingual customer support and generative design. That’s far from AGI, but it’s exactly the deployment layer that creates real economic pull for models, infra and talent.([pwc.in](https://www.pwc.in/press-releases/2026/ai-has-the-potential-to-unleash-nearly-usd-150-billion-to-the-value-creation-journey-of-manufacturing-msmes-as-early-as-2035.html?utm_source=openai))

For the race to AGI, the significance is twofold. First, if MSMEs adopt AI at scale, they become a massive distributed dataset: operational telemetry, defects, loan performance, supplier risk – all of it feeding into better models and domain‑specific agents. Second, broad‑based productivity gains in manufacturing improve the fiscal and political room to keep investing in high‑end compute and foundational research. A country that sees AI paying off in its factories is more likely to back large public–private bets on frontier models.

The flip side is execution risk. MSMEs face chronic constraints in capital, skills and data infrastructure. Unless the ecosystem solves for shared platforms, affordable tools and trustworthy integrators, the $150B figure will remain aspirational. But if even half that value is realized, it will deepen India’s stake in pushing AI capabilities forward, indirectly supporting the global sprint toward more general systems.