As India accelerates its artificial intelligence ambitions, industry leaders are warning that the country’s long-term competitiveness will depend less on flashy models and more on the integrity of its data
As India accelerates its artificial intelligence ambitions, industry leaders are warning that the country’s long-term competitiveness will depend less on flashy models and more on the integrity of its data.
Raj K Gopalakrishnan, CEO and Co-Founder of KOGO AI, told Firstpost that the strength of India’s AI ecosystem will depend heavily on the quality and governance of the data being used—because even the most powerful AI produces poor results if it is trained on flawed data.
“Data is the beacon of truth,” he told Firstpost. “If the data is false, everything that follows will be false.”
The dialect challenge
For Raoul Nanavati, Founder and CEO of Navana.ai, India’s linguistic diversity illustrates both the scale of opportunity and the magnitude of the data problem.
“Most AI services globally have been built in the West,” Nanavati said. “If we are serious about inclusive AI, we need region-specific datasets that reflect Indian realities—in language, accent, context and behaviour.”
Without such localisation, he argued, AI systems risk amplifying bias or delivering inaccurate results when deployed in India’s heterogeneous markets.
Sovereignty and trust
Beyond fairness, data localisation is emerging as a core trust issue for enterprises—particularly in data-sensitive sectors such as banking and financial services.
Executives from Beyond Key added that India needs to fast-track domestic data centre expansion to support AI workloads at scale. While digital public infrastructure has generated vast datasets, the management, standardisation and compute backbone required to fully harness them remain works in progress.
However, they acknowledged that large-scale data centre development brings environmental trade-offs. High energy consumption and water usage have triggered sustainability concerns globally.
Industry voices suggested renewable energy integration and carbon-neutral commitments will be essential if India is to expand AI infrastructure without escalating its carbon footprint.
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