India's advanced digital public infrastructure, encompassing UPI, Aadhaar, and ONDC, positions it uniquely for AI leadership by generating extensive multilingual data. This infrastructure provides a solid foundation for developing AI solutions that address the critical needs of the Global South for affordability and multilingual functionality, areas where current frontier models fall short. India's distinct opportunity is to create practical, low-cost AI accessible on ordinary smartphones, solving real-world problems for billions and generating significant long-term economic and geopolitical advantages.

India's advanced digital public infrastructure, encompassing UPI, Aadhaar, and ONDC, positions it uniquely for AI leadership by generating extensive multilingual data. This infrastructure provides a solid foundation for developing AI solutions that address the critical needs of the Global South for affordability and multilingual functionality, areas where current frontier models fall short. India's distinct opportunity is to create practical, low-cost AI accessible on ordinary smartphones, solving real-world problems for billions and generating significant long-term economic and geopolitical advantages.

India's advanced digital public infrastructure, encompassing UPI, Aadhaar, and ONDC, positions it uniquely for AI leadership by generating extensive multilingual data. This infrastructure provides a solid foundation for developing AI solutions that address the critical needs of the Global South for affordability and multilingual functionality, areas where current frontier models fall short. India's distinct opportunity is to create practical, low-cost AI accessible on ordinary smartphones, solving real-world problems for billions and generating significant long-term economic and geopolitical advantages.

Of all Global South countries, India has the strongest claim to AI leadership. The reason is not simply the size of its economy or population. It is what India has already built.

For much of the world, an AI model that can operate reliably in multiple languages on an ordinary smartphone will create more value than a frontier model chasing benchmark records.

Over the past decade, India has created the world’s most advanced digital public infrastructure. This includes the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Aadhaar and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which connects businesses across 600-plus cities. This infrastructure has generated vast amounts of multilingual, real-world data. As AI becomes the defining technology of this century, these assets give India a foundation that few countries can match.

The priorities driving today’s AI race are largely set by the needs and economics of advanced markets. Frontier models are optimised for performance, scale and sophisticated benchmarks. Yet for much of the world, the most important question is not whether an AI model can achieve a marginally higher score on a technical evaluation. It is whether it can solve real problems at a cost that governments, businesses and citizens can afford.

This gap becomes clear when language is considered. The world’s most advanced models perform exceptionally in English and a handful others, but often less well in Telugu, Swahili or Bahasa. They were not primarily developed around the needs of a farmer in Andhra Pradesh or a health worker in Nairobi because those users are not the markets driving investment decisions.

The most powerful frontier models remain expensive to deploy at the scale required for public services across low- and middle-income countries. For much of the Global South, affordability is the first-order constraint.

This is where India’s opportunity lies. The question is not whether India can outspend the US or outscale China. It is whether it can build AI that is multilingual, affordable and practical for the billions of people who sit outside the world’s richest economies.

This is why usefulness matters. For much of the world, an AI model that can operate reliably in multiple languages on an ordinary smartphone will create more value than a frontier model chasing benchmark records. As the World Bank has argued, many developing countries need practical, low-cost AI that solves real problems, not simply bigger AI.

India’s opportunity is to build exactly that.

Across the world, leveraging the benefits of AI and navigating its risks has become a competition between two powers with antithetical values and ideas about what technology ought to do for people. As other nations feel pushed into a binary choice, there is a growing demand for a third way.

For India, the returns are compounding. As other sovereigns build their digital governance learning or leveraging India’s multilingual AI models, low-cost approaches, and sovereign governance framework, each acts as a node in an influence network whose dividends are compounded over decades in trade, investments and geopolitical heft.

Agarwal is country director (India), Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

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