AI is a bigger opportunity than PCs, internet or smartphones: Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani at Walmart's annual event Converge, alongwith Walmart's CTO Suresh Kumar.

Infosys cofounder and Chairman Nandan Nilekani, on August 29, said Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the biggest opportunity yet, bigger than the personal computer, the internet, or even smartphones.

“I think what we see today is the biggest of them all (PCs, the internet, and smartphones). Not just for the tech, but the possible impact,” Nilekani said at a fireside chat with Walmart Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer, Suresh Kumar.

He added that AI/Gen AI can be used to deliver education and healthcare. “Because we never have enough teachers and enough doctors, if we can amplify existing human doctors and teachers to deliver better healthcare, it will change the game,” Nilekani added.

“Wish I was 40 years younger,” he said in jest.

Also, read: Indian GCCs power Agentic AI, core infrastructure for global operations: Walmart CTO

Largest Indian language AI open-source stack

Nilekani said that IIT Madras’ AI4Bharat lab is developing the largest Indian language capability AI open-source stack that anybody could use. “These kind of things will dramatically reduce time and speed of adoption, and put really useful things in the hands of people,” he added.

AI4Bharat is an open-source initiative at IIT-Madras aimed at building foundational AI models for Indian languages.

Nilekani, often called the Chief Technology Officer of India, gave an example of a farmer in Bihar who can talk in his version of Hindi, Maithili, and Bhojpuri and get real-time information from his agent on farming practices or market access.

“(If that happens, then) we have delivered and that's how we think about AI for India,” he added.

On June 6, 2025, Nilekani committed a second multi-year grant to AI4Bharat.

AI4Bharat has quietly become the language backbone of India’s AI stack. Its open-source speech, translation and text-to-speech models now power key public digital platforms.

When Gen AI models burst into the mainstream in 2022 with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, India already had the foundations in place. Applications were built within weeks of ChatGPT's release, ranging from chatbots in regional languages to integrations in governance and education.

And the underlying infrastructure for this rapid deployment was AI4Bharat’s models.

Also, read: Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani: ‘Let the big boys in the Valley build LLMs; we will use it to solve real-world problems’