Proposed AI hub in state to shift economic trajectory, says official at AI summit

Bhubaneswar: Pitching Odisha as India’s next big AI destination, state govt on Wednesday said its upcoming sovereign AI hub — backed by a Rs 20,000 crore investment from Sarvam AI and expected to create 5,000 high-skilled jobs — will fundamentally shift the economic trajectory, may be over the next five years.

Additional chief secretary (electronics & IT) Vishal Kumar Dev, who delivered a talk on ‘Democratisation of AI — Bharat Story’ at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, outlined Odisha’s AI roadmap and cross-sector use cases.


Dev told TOI that the proposed hub will require specialised talent to operate an AI-optimised infrastructure, positioning Odisha as a serious player in the global tech landscape. “The facility will create 5,000 very highly skilled jobs, extending its impact beyond Odisha and strengthening the national AI ecosystem,” he said.

Dev said Sarvam AI signed an MoU with the state on Feb 6 during the Black Swan Summit in Bhubaneswar, paving the way for establishment of the hub. The project, he noted, is envisioned as the backbone of Odisha’s digital transformation, enabling the state to gradually reduce its dependence on mining and metals and accelerate its shift towards technology-led growth.

He said Odisha is pushing ahead with an ambitious artificial intelligence (AI) roadmap anchored around five priority sectors — healthcare, education, agriculture, disaster management and governance — with the state positioning AI not as experimental pilots but as frontline tools for public service delivery, particularly for rural, tribal and low-literacy populations.

Dev said the govt has already begun deploying AI-driven solutions across departments. These include AI-assisted clinical decision support and disease screening for rural health centres; voice-first, Odia language AI systems for citizen services and grievance redressal; precision agriculture advisories delivered through AI-powered IVR systems backed by hyper-local climate data; and urban flood prevention and disaster planning models built using AI analytics and digital twin technology.

To scale these interventions, the state has adopted a structured “through-the-funnel” model that takes use cases from departmental identification to pilots and then to statewide rollout. Odisha has also emerged as one of the leading contributors to India’s AI ecosystem, having uploaded over 1,600 Odia literary datasets to ‘AIKosh’ to support the development of local language machine learning models. Alongside this, the govt is systematically building high-quality Odia language datasets — both written and audio — to train more accurate and context-sensitive AI systems and ensure that citizens can interact with digital services seamlessly in their native language.

“A large section of people are more comfortable interacting through voice than text, so our approach is centred on inclusivity,” Dev said. “Our goal is to ensure AI benefits everyone — truly AI for all.”