At the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, venture capitalist Bejul Somaia called for a shift in how India’s artificial intelligence ambitions are evaluated, arguing that trajectory matters more than present limitations.Speaking at the summit, Somaia said conversations around India and AI tend to gravitate toward infrastructure gaps — limited access to compute, uneven data quality, and the complexity of serving a linguistically diverse population. These, he acknowledged, are real challenges. But they reflect the current state, not the country’s long-term destiny.
“What matters is not where you are but how fast you are moving,” Somaia said, urging policymakers and founders to focus on momentum rather than comparisons with established global AI hubs.
According to him, the more relevant indicators of India’s AI future lie in the pace of AI adoption among developers, the depth of engineering talent, and the ecosystem’s ability to experiment and ship products quickly. India’s vast developer base and growing engagement with generative AI tools, enterprise use cases and open-source ecosystems, he suggested, signal forward momentum.His remarks come amid wider debates at the summit around sovereign compute capacity, semiconductor supply chains and regulatory frameworks. While those structural factors are important, Somaia indicated that human capital and execution speed may ultimately define India’s competitive edge.In that framing, India’s AI journey is less a snapshot of current gaps — and more a moving graph where the slope matters more than the scale.
