India is still early in its journey to becoming an AI powerhouse.
On Tortoise’s Global AI Index, India was identified as having particular strengths in its operating environment and talent base, but lagging behind in infrastructure and development compared to other second tier AI powers.22
To become a leading AI nation, India must execute a strategy focused on:
Building world-class digital foundations to help boost internet penetration among individuals and digital maturity among businesses.
Investing in AI-ready human capital to focus on the urgent need of increasing confidence among workers to boost adoption of AI and encourage participation in the AI economy.
Championing inclusive growth to ensure that the benefits of AI reach all corners of the country.
India’s AI strengths compared to other second tier AI powers.
Source: Tortoise’s Global AI Index
We exclude the US and China as global AI giants, and compare India against the average score of Singapore, United Kingdom, France, South Korea, Germany, Canada and Israel.
India will need to continue reducing connectivity gaps and encouraging widespread adoption.
The majority of today’s AI tools require having a connection and familiarity with the internet. While internet penetration has been growing in India, according to data released by the Government of India, only two-thirds of the population had internet access in 2024. At the same time, even among those already connected, we saw significant gaps in AI adoption: with female, elderly, and non-graduate Indians significantly less likely to be using AI tools.
To maximise the AI opportunity, India will have to champion inclusive growth and address adoption gaps. This will involve encouraging greater adoption across genders, age groups, education levels, and investing in digital infrastructure to speed up adoption.
If we don’t work to reverse the gap in worker AI adoption, it could reduce the overall potential economic benefits from AI by
Share of the population that use the internet.
Source: ITU Data Hub
Share of the population that use the internet.
Source: ITU Data Hub
Relative usage of AI models.
The chart details how various demographic groups differ relative to the Indian national average on AI usage (i.e. a score higher than 1 indicates higher than average, a score lower than 1 indicates lower than average). This is calculated from responses on frequency of AI usage from our consumer polling:
Supported by Google.org, Karya is bridging the rural digital divide.
Karya is a nonprofit AI start-up creating inclusive digital jobs for underserved rural communities in India. Using a mobile-first platform, Karya enables workers to complete data annotation tasks, such as audio transcription, image labeling, and dataset creation, that support the development of global AI systems.
In just two years, the organisation has provided meaningful work to over 50,000 people,23 90%24 of whom come from marginalised backgrounds. This work enables people from these communities to earn up to 20 times the local minimum wage.25
With a US$1 million grant from Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, Karya is expanding its mission to bring AI-enabled economic opportunity to low-income communities around the world. As part of this effort, Karya is developing a Generative AI-powered multilingual chatbot to provide real-time support for its app and web-based work platforms that provide access to AI-related digital tasks, enabling people across a range of digital competencies to avail themselves of expanded economic opportunities in languages of their choice. This grant is also funding the creation of a digital skilling curriculum and experience framework, which will be translated into 10 Indic languages. These initiatives align with India’s vision for an AI-ready workforce and aim to bring well-paid digital work to tens of thousands more people from underserved communities.
In just two years, the organisation has provided meaningful work to over
90% of whom come from marginalised backgrounds.
Indian workers showed a strong interest in more training in AI skills.
To maximise the opportunity from AI, Indian workers will need upskilling to gainfully participate in the AI economy. In our research, we found that over the next five years, 73 million workers will need additional training to help them either fully take advantage of AI tools or support their career transition to a new role. In our polling, we saw significant interest in formal training to learn more about AI, with 87% of workers saying they would be interested in skills training to help them better take advantage of AI.
of workers said they wanted to better understand how AI models worked.
of workers said they would like to know more practical use cases of how to use AI.
of workers said they would like to know how they can best prompt AI models to get the most out of them.
Google’s AI tools are enabling Jagran Josh to deliver exam results and boost news readership.
Jagran Josh is one of India’s leading education platforms, committed to simplifying test preparation for millions of students and future job applicants. Launched by Jagran Prakashan Limited, it offers comprehensive resources for major competitive exams, from banking and civil services to MBA entrance tests and CBSE board exams. With study materials, practice tests, expert tips, and real-time alerts available via web, mobile apps, and SMS, Jagran Josh ensures learners have access to quality content anytime and anywhere.26
During the pandemic, when the platform experienced a large surge in user traffic around exam results day, Jagran Josh used Google’s Compute Engine to manage traffic and ensure that all users were able to access the information they needed in a timely manner, and later scale down usage after peak periods had lapsed.
Jagran’s broader news website has also experienced significant benefits since using Google’s AI tools. Monthly traffic to its official news website increased by 50% since migrating to ‘Looker Studio,’ an AI business intelligence platform powered by Google. Insights from Looker Studio also increased Jagran’s base of brand lovers by 300%.27
“Using Looker Studio, we can better understand what content works and what doesn’t. Our product team now works closely with the editors to optimize the best performing content for even better visibility.”
Ajit Kumar
Associate Vice President of Technology at Jagran New Media
A lack of digitally mature businesses in India could hold back AI adoption.
Around half of the economic benefits of AI will require complementary investments for businesses, or working to update and adapt workflows. An important preparatory step for this is digitalising existing workflows,28 for example, by increasing cloud spending. Cloud infrastructure provides the scalable compute power and storage needed to train, deploy, and operate AI models efficiently and cost-effectively. At present, however, the level of digital maturity of Indian businesses is relatively low compared to other countries.29