‘India can reach AI frontier in one year with $10-billion push’

Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Peak XV Partners and Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder and CEO, Sarvam AI, have a conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express Group and Soumyarendra Barik Assistant Editor, The Indian Express, during an Express Adda session in Mumbai on 03 August 2026. (Express photo by Sankhadeep Banerjee)

Rajan Anandan, managing director at venture capital firm Peak XV Partners, said 2026 is the year India formally entered the global AI race, pointing to new investments in computing capacity, the launch of domestic models and growing demand for enterprise applications such as voice AI.

“The way that we think about it is that India is early in the AI game, and 2026 is the year that India has entered the AI race,” Anandan said. “Compute was a big constraint, but starting at the AI summit in February in Delhi, we’ve had over $400 billion of AI capex that has been announced.”

The India AI Impact Summit, held in New Delhi in February, had seen big names like the Reliance Group, Adani Group and the Tata Group, among others, commit to investments in the country’s AI ecosystem.

At the Express Adda, Kumar and Anandan were in conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, Indian Express Group, and Soumyarendra Barik, Assistant Editor, The Indian Express.

Anandan said voice AI, in particular, will be the “first billion dollar revenue category” for Indian enterprises in the AI space, with the overall market projected at around $10 billion. Voice AI, which uses artificial intelligence to conduct and respond to spoken conversations, is emerging as one of India’s earliest large-scale enterprise AI opportunities, particularly in customer service and call centres.

Asked why India had defined its AI goals in the context of having “sovereign” models, a narrative Sarvam has also leaned on, Kumar said India should focus on deploying “whatever are the best” AI models on “price and accuracy” tradeoffs. He added that India “needs to have its own story, which we rely on and continue to compound”.

Addressing anxieties around AI’s impact on jobs, which has already seen some of India’s largest employers in the IT services sector signal a slowdown in headcount addition, Anandan said, “The largest companies have never been the source of employment growth, ever… We had a period of time where IT services (hired in large numbers)… but they will not hire lots and lots of people because they will leverage AI.”

Though he agreed there will be “significant dislocation” of current jobs — for instance, in sectors like customer care — requiring companies and individuals to upskill, he said a large share of new jobs would need to come from the innovation ecosystem.

“Upskilling is going to be the single biggest thing. We have the world’s largest young population, and we have to make sure that we’re upskilling them to unleash innovation. A million Indians turn 18 every month, which means 12 million Indians are entering the workforce every year, so we have to create 100 million jobs in the next eight years… a few top companies are not going to be able to do that, so it has to be done by a large number of entrepreneurs starting businesses,” Anandan said.

Anandan cited the example of Microsoft hiring 6,000 forward deployed engineers, a role which, he said, did not exist 18 months ago. Forward-deployed engineers combine software development with an understanding of business problems, working inside client organisations to tailor and implement AI systems for specific use cases.

Anandan also said that the recent students’ protest at Jantar Mantar could represent early signs of a broader anxiety over jobs and economic opportunities. “What we saw possibly was early signs of (what can happen) if we don’t create opportunities for 100 million Indians over the next decade, you’re going to see things like this possibly happen,” Anandan said.

The Express Adda is a series of informal interactions organised by the Indian Express Group, featuring those at the centre of change.

Previous guests include Union Ministers S Jaishankar, Mansukh Mandaviya and Hardeep Singh Puri; Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen; Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran; His Holiness the Dalai Lama; cricket icons Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma; chess legend Viswanathan Anand; Olympic gold medallist javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra; and motivational strategist Gaur Gopal Das.