India is waiting for AI’s UPI-like moment – Crypto News

India’s artificial intelligence (AI) story is slowly playing out, but for the true unlocks to happen, there needs to be large-scale adoption of the technology, according to panellists at the Mint India Investment Summit 2026.

India’s AI infrastructure buildout is well on its way, with firms such as Yotta Data Services, Neysa Networks, and Sify Technologies all focused on ensuring there are enough data centres to meet the rising demand from companies here.

“We as a country are waiting for some UPI moments to come to AI, where some government-to-consumer use cases adopt the scale of AI,” said Sunil Gupta, co-founder, managing director and chief executive at Yotta.

Just as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become a regular fixture in people’s lives in India, processing billions of transactions every year, so too will AI. “One UPI moment in AI will result in multiple AI moments later,” Gupta said.

While AI has caused a global shift, Indian companies, startups and the government have realized the country also needs to ensure there is high-performance compute capacity available to those working on the technology.

This is evident in how the IndiaAI Mission has been working to acquire 18,000 high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) needed for computations of complex maths that run the algorithms for AI.

But while there is definitely excitement about AI, there are also performance indicators to keep in mind, according to Sandip Patel, managing director at IBM India & South Asia. “It’s not so much about the models now. It’s whether you have the infrastructure that you can deploy and use responsibly. Whether you have the right kind of AI, which, with governance, can be trusted with its outcomes.”

He added that it was important that companies have the right data for specific use cases to deliver meaningful outcomes that push businesses in the right direction. “They need to do all of this with the right kind of cost optimization and sustained RoI. That becomes very critical,” Patel added.

Voice-first AI as a growing use case

For enterprises, making sure that their investments in AI are actually beneficial has become crucial. But where AI companies struggle, especially in the enterprise, is the mismatch between what they create and the value their clients actually seek.

“We’ve realized that enterprise AI is really hard for three reasons: Most are designed for engineers, by engineers, not for business users. Secondly, there is an engineering challenge due to lots of disparate data spread across multiple systems,” said Ajoy Singh, chief AI officer, at recently listed AI company Fractal Analytics. “Thirdly, the pace of change. What was state-of-the-art six months ago becomes outdated.”

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t pockets where enterprises can find value. In India, several companies in the banking, financial services and insurance segment have opted to use voice-first AI in some of their systems, such as loan collection or debt reminders.

“On the voice side, enterprises have decided to take this to the next level,” said voice-first AI startup Gnani.ai’s co-founder and CEO Ganesh Gopalan. The company currently caters to 150 enterprise customers in India and approximately 200 worldwide.

According to Gopalan, the reason voice AI is reaching scale is that existing systems for customer interaction and engagement are currently broken. “Some of the property banks in India that we work with found that our AI systems are about 10% better than their existing systems. At the enterprise level, especially for larger banks, evaluation is always done. It’s always going to be based on RoI,” he said.

For enterprise companies such as Gnani.ai, and even for Fractal Analytics, support, both in terms of policy and GPU access, through the IndiaAI Mission has played a crucial role. Even so, the government has made it clear that while they’re not going to regulate AI and risk innovation, there have to be checks and balances.

“The underlying factor for the government, even while attracting investment, is that innovation has to have human oversight. Companies are not yet at that stage where the machines will run themselves. And that human oversight and therefore the human responsibility and accountability need to be there,” said Nisha Uberoi, partner at JSA Advocates & Solicitors.