India’s AI ecosystem must move from ‘cottage industry’ to ‘factory’: Sarvam’s Vivek Raghavan

Raghavan also highlighted India’s linguistic diversity as another important factor influencing the country’s approach to AI development.India needs to transform its artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem from a cottage industry into a factory by developing the capabilities to deploy AI at scale, Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam AI, one of the first startups selected under the IndiaAI Mission, said on Thursday.He was speaking at the launch of the World Bank Group’s report titled ‘World Development Report 2026: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence’, organised with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) at New Delhi.Raghavan said that India is a highly cost-sensitive market and needs to focus on developing affordable and efficient AI solutions.“While global discussions around AI development often assume that the technology’s potential value justifies its high cost, India needs to focus on building AI solutions that are both affordable and efficient,” he said.Raghavan also highlighted India’s linguistic diversity as another important factor influencing the country’s approach to AI development. “These characteristics make India an important testing ground for how AI could eventually serve the other six billion people around the world,” he said.He added that India’s unique market conditions require a different approach to AI development, emphasising the need to build capabilities across the entire technology stack. “The truth is that we need to adopt a full-stack approach,” Raghavan said.He said that building AI models alone is not enough and India must also develop the capabilities and infrastructure needed to operate a complete AI platform.“This means having control over hardware, including GPUs, the ability to develop AI models, and the infrastructure to deploy and run models of different sizes, both small and large, developed across the world,” he said.Raghavan said that India needs to focus on building capabilities across the entire spectrum of AI technologies.“The model itself is now only one part of the intelligence in an AI system.

The next layer of intelligence lies in what we call the harness, which includes the systems and tools surrounding the model,” he said.Sarvam AI was selected under the IndiaAI Mission in April 2025 to develop an indigenous sovereign large language model.

The project included plans for a 120-billion-parameter model focused on Indian languages, reasoning and public-service applications.In February 2026, Sarvam launched sovereign AI models at the IndiaAI Impact Summit.

The government subsequently confirmed that the models were available through AIKosh for developers to build applications.