The industry is at an inflection point where artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a technology wave; it is a realignment of global capabilities, Indiaspora founder and chairman MR Rangaswami said here on Wednesday.
“Across start-ups, enterprises and research labs, Indians are helping to define how AI is built, applied and scaled around the world. What’s remarkable is not just the speed of change, but also who’s driving it,” he said while unveiling two new studies: “How Top 100 AI Startups Are Shaping India’s Tech Future” and “The AI Opportunity at Global an AI Capability Centre” organized by Suami.
Reshaping all sectors
As the findings show, 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 unique crossroads with high stakes.
Research jointly conducted by Indiaspora and Zinnov found that India’s AI startup ecosystem, built on culture, infrastructure and capital, has quickly become one of the most important forces in the global tech landscape.
The study found that the country has entered the AI era with a structural advantage that few countries can match. For start-ups, this means faster time-to-market and greater accessibility, making India one of the most favorable environments in the world for AI development.
What they brought up
The survey further found that India’s top 100 AI startups have collectively raised more than $3.6 billion in funding while generating $596 million in revenue. These businesses have solved real problems in Enterprise SaaS, healthcare, logistics and more. Together, they employ nearly 20,000 people, demonstrating that India’s AI economy is creating tangible economic value at scale.
As for the GCC, the report notes that over the decades, the country has built sophisticated centers that have evolved far beyond their original mandate in terms of cost and scale, providing deep expertise, strategic judgment and frontier innovation that rival headquarters around the world. For most of this journey, 70-80% of GCC’s work was focused on execution, a model that rewarded depth of process, breadth of portfolio and incremental improvement over long time horizons.
However, AI has completely collapsed this time horizon. The result is that what once took ten years is now done in months: redrawing the boundaries of work, compressing expertise into procedures and procedures into automation.
Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov, a management and strategy consultancy, said AI is fundamentally reorganizing how and where innovation happens, compressing what once took decades into cycles of months. What set India apart at this point was not just scale, but the ability to build and deploy in real-world complexity.
“We are seeing a clear shift – from execution to co-creation – across startups and global capability centers as the value shifts from building models to their subsequent application. India is emerging as one of the clearest examples of how this future is being built,” added Mr. Natarajan.
Published – 25 March 2026 23:10 IST
