The industry is at an inflection point where artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a technology wave; it is a reordering of global capability, said M.R. Rangaswami, founder and chairman, Indiaspora, here on Wednesday.
“Across start-ups, enterprises, and research labs, Indians are helping define how AI is built, applied, and scaled worldwide. What is remarkable is not just the speed of change, but who is driving it,” he said while unveiling two new studies: “How Top 100 AI Start-ups are Shaping India’s Tech Future” and “AI opportunity of Global Capability Centres”, at an AI Summit organised by Indiaspora.
Reshaping all sectors
As per the findings, AI is reshaping every sector at an unprecedented pace, and India, a global technology and business hub home to the world’s most influential companies, stands at a uniquely high-stakes crossroads.
The research jointly conducted by Indiaspora and Zinnov found that India’s AI startup ecosystem, engineered by culture, infrastructure, and capital, was fast becoming one of the most consequential forces in the global technology landscape.
The study found that the country entered the AI era with a structural advantage few nations can match. For start-ups, this means faster time-to-market and greater accessibility, making India one of the most favourable environments in the world for AI development.
What they raised
The survey further found that India’s top 100 AI startups have collectively raised over $3.6 billion in funding, while generating $596 million in revenue. These enterprises were solving real-world problems across Enterprise SaaS, healthcare, logistics, and more. Together, they employ nearly 20,000 people, demonstrating that India’s AI economy was creating tangible economic value at scale, it found.
On GCCs, the report said that they were build over decades in the country into sophisticated hubs that evolved far beyond their original cost-and-scale mandate, delivering deep expertise, strategic judgment, and frontier innovation that rivals headquarters worldwide. For most of that journey, 70–80% of GCC work was execution-focused, a model that rewarded process depth, portfolio breadth, and incremental improvement over long time horizons.
However, AI has collapsed that time horizon entirely. As a result, what once took a decade now gets done in months: by redrawing the boundaries of work, compressing expertise into procedure, and procedure into automation.
Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov, a management and strategy consulting firm, said that AI has been fundamentally reorganising how and where innovation happens, compressing what once took decades into cycles of months. What set India apart at this moment was not just scale, but the ability to build and deploy under real-world complexity.
“We’re seeing a clear shift — from execution to co-creation — across both startups and global capability centers, as value moves from building models to applying them in consequential ways. India is emerging as one of the clearest proving grounds for how that future gets built,’’ added Mr. Natarajan.
Published – March 25, 2026 11:10 pm IST
