Can India reap AI gains?: That hinges on having ownership of AI capability

That hinges on having ownership of AI capability
By Harsimran Sandhu & Susmi Routray

Artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI and agentic AI, is increasingly being positioned as the productivity engine of this decade. The promise is compelling: faster coding, automated customer service, instant research, lower operating costs, and smarter decision-making. For India, AI could unlock major productivity gains across industries.

But the more important question is not whether AI will create value. It is: who will ultimately capture that value?

To understand this, one must look beneath the visible AI applications. At the core of generative AI lies the large language model (LLM), which powers chatbots, copilots, enterprise agents, retrieval-augmented systems (RAGs), and a growing ecosystem of AI applications. These systems work by processing massive volumes of text through transformer architectures and continuously predicting the next token to generate responses.