Why AI can be a major driver of India’s growth

Arundhati Bhattacharya, president & CEO of Salesforce in South Asia and who was formerly chairman of State Bank of India, recollected that when she was looking after eastern UP during her SBI stint, cane farmers would often have to torch their crops because of poor demand, and yet they would continue planting the same amount of crop year after year. They had no market data to guide them. But today, AI is beginning to change that, she said. Agentic AI, she said, can take the farmer’s field data, do soil analysis, understand the weather forecast for that area, the futures prices, understand the demand and supply forecasts, and come up with the best recommendation on what that farmer needs to sow and when. Wastages like this are ubiquitous in India’s supply chains, and AI could potentially eliminate them.

Similarly, in education, Bhattacharya said, advances in AI are such that it will be able to understand each child’s potential, what they want to learn, their speed of learning and, based on that, create individualised curriculum to bring out the best in each.

Bhattacharya was part of a discussion we had on how AI, agentic AI in particular, can accelerate India’s vision to be a $10 trillion economy within the next decade. Agentic AI systems are capable of autonomous decision-making and complex task execution, enabling sharper productivity gains, stronger innovation ecosystems, and making it possible for a lot more people to undertake productive economic activities.
Saurabh Kumar Sahu, MD & lead for the India business at Accenture, said the company’s research shows that AI could contribute nearly $675 billion to the Indian economy over the next 12 to 15 years. “This value can be unlocked as we discover more areas to apply AI meaningfully and at scale,” he said.

Rajesh Gopal, global chief digital officer at Tata Consumer Products, owner of brands like Tata Tea, Tata Coffee, Soulfull and Organic India, spoke about several such use cases. One solution helps their salesmen influence outlets on what products to stock. “The AI/ML model analyses outlet buying patterns, profiles of similar outlets, new products introduced, etc, to suggest cross-sell and upsell recommendations,” he said. Another uses AI/ML to analyse multiple data points such as sales history, distributor data, and external data like weather to generate accurate forecasts for sales of finished goods and how much of key commodities to buy.

Govt-biz-academia collaborationSahu said companies like Tata, Salesforce, and Accenture should come together with the govt, startups and academia to identify ways in which the economy can grow by symbiotic use of frontier technologies. “That is when we can truly become a cradle of AI consumption i n the world, and not just be a cradle of tech talent for the world,” he said.

Bhattacharya agreed. She said for a country as large and diverse as India to launch into the AI age, it was crucial for ecosystem players to collaborate, and have the right kind of policies and initiatives.

She noted that India has so long been exporting services, but it now needs to export outcomes. And that, she said, will happen when services are infused with AI, so that you know exactly what you need to do to get those outcomes. “And that is where the govt also needs to think very clearly, in collaboration with industry and academia, as to which way to take our people so that we realise value from all the evolving technologies,” she said.