Comfortably dumb...
You've ordered dinner after a long workday. You open the box… and something's off. It’s not what you ordered, or something’s missing. Instead of eating, you're stuck in a digital loop with a chatbot trained to apologize, not resolve.
Food delivery support is starting to feel like an order that keeps getting sent back to the kitchen, acknowledged, remade, but never quite served.
Bots run the floor: Support is increasingly automated, but also increasingly scripted.
Swiggy and Zomato are leaning heavily on AI chatbots to handle customer queries at scale, especially for repeat issues.
For standard complaints like missing items or wrong orders, predefined flows often resolve issues quickly.
“There are a bunch of predictable complaints where automation works really well… it’s inefficient to route those to a human agent,” said Srinivasan Subramani of Clevertap.
Orders get stuck: The friction shows up when complaints don’t fit neatly into preset categories like partial deliveries or context-heavy quality issues.
“It’s like you’re trying to explain something specific, but the system only understands fixed options,” said Gurugram-based consultant Ankit Sharma.
In such cases, the complaint gets acknowledged and routed, but resolution often remains out of reach.
Friction on purpose: Some of the resistance is built into the recipe.
The shift to chatbots is driven by cost control at scale, where handling millions of queries through humans becomes expensive.
It also helps limit misuse, after years of easy refunds and complaint escalations.
“In some cases, systems are deliberately designed to add a bit of friction… if you make it too easy, you risk abuse,” Subramani said.
Spillover to kitchens: When platforms tighten, the mess moves elsewhere.
Restaurants say genuine complaints are becoming harder to resolve, even as frivolous ones are filtered out.
“When there is a genuine problem…these chatbots are causing an increase in friction,” said Pranav Rungta of Churchgate Hospitality, which operates premium dining restaurants.
Customers are also reaching out directly to restaurants, even when the issue lies with the platform or delivery.
Not boiling over: The heat is rising, but not enough to trigger action.
Only about 5–10% of orders face issues, as per industry estimates, limiting any visible impact on overall demand.
At scale, though, that still translates to hundreds of thousands of problematic orders daily.
For now, the friction remains a user-side problem, not an industry-level flashpoint.
Next course: Human support may not disappear, it may just get gated.
“Over time, faster resolution or access to a human could become a premium offering,” said Satish Meena of Datum Intelligence.
The model is evolving toward AI as the first layer, with humans reserved for complex or high-value cases.
Until then, the system holds, efficient for most orders, but frustrating when things go off-script.
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Adobe's next act
For years, creating great digital content meant mastering complex tools and controls on products like Photoshop and Illustrator.
But the generative AI era is changing that. Instead of navigating layers of menus and controls, users can now simply describe what they want to create and see it appear.
The result? Lower barriers to creativity and far more people able to create digital content.
"Adobe's mission has been creativity for all for the longest time, but it has been challenging for us to truly deliver on that mission," Govind Balakrishnan, a global product veteran at Adobe, told us in an exclusive interview.
As more tools and capabilities are added over time, the software also becomes more complex for users to learn and use them.
Enter Adobe Express
Adobe Express is Adobe's answer to this new era of creativity. The app brings together the best of Adobe’s creative and AI capabilities in a simple interface that lets anyone create photos, videos or designs within minutes.
"We are on a path to completely reimagine creativity," said Balakrishnan, who oversees the business strategy, product management, and engineering for Adobe Express.“With a conversational-first interface, we believe that we are reimagining how people use these creative tools by removing many of the barriers and giving them the ability to express their ideas and see it show up.” he added.
The idea is simple: when users open the app, they see a prompt bar asking what they want to create. They don’t have to know where the tools or templates are.
The tools are still there — but users only need them when they want finer-grained edits.
This approach builds on similar conversational experiences across Adobe’s wider product ecosystem, including Photoshop, Firefly and Acrobat.
Why Adobe Express matters to Adobe’s future
Adobe Express is now a critical part of the company's future growth strategy, serving as its direct answer to the wave of AI tools from startups and tech giants that have made content creation faster and more accessible than ever.
It also comes as Adobe prepares for a leadership transition. Longtime Indian-American CEO Shantanu Narayen is set to step down after 18 years at the helm.
During his tenure, Adobe moved from boxed software to cloud-based subscriptions, dominating the creative tools market.
Now in the generative AI era, Adobe is now betting that products like Express will power its next phase of growth.
Also Read: Real value for customers is in interface, not in data or AI models: Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen
Telco and product integrations
A major priority for Adobe Express is expanding its reach to new users.
"In this new age where things are continuing to evolve at a very rapid pace, our goal is to meet the customers where they are and not require them to go and find us," Balakrishnan said.
Adobe is building integrations for Express across its suite of applications.
For instance, users in Adobe Acrobat can edit images, stylise documents or generate presentations using Express. They can also turn still Photoshop assets into animations or videos.
The company is also expanding distribution through partnerships.
Offering a premium version of Adobe Express free for one year to 360 million Airtel users, including professional design, video and AI-powered creative tools worth Rs 4,000.
A multi-year partnership with the Premier League to bring AI-personalised digital experiences to fans, allowing them to design badges and kits for Fantasy Premier League teams using Adobe Express.
Integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT to generate and edit designs
As the creator economy expands and AI tools become more powerful, Adobe expects the next chapter of digital creativity will be defined by simpler, more intuitive software.
Read the story
Picture abhi baaki h(AI)
AI assemble!
That’s what filmmaker M.S.N. Karthik did when he produced his latest short film—Unmasked.
Instead of the usual army of camera operators, lighting technicians and VFX artists, the eight-minute supernatural thriller was largely made by one person—armed with a stack of AI tools.
Unmasked kept audiences hooked at the Delhi AI Film Festival.
But Karthik’s film is not just a festival experiment. It’s a glimpse into what filmmaking might soon look like.
Ways AI is changing filmmaking
According to Sanket Shah, founder of AI video platform Invideo, the disruption is happening in big ways.
Pre-visualisation as directors no longer rely on rough sketches to imagine scenes.
AI can simulate lighting, camera angles, backgrounds, time of day—all before a single frame is shot.
Expensive scenes—like car crashes or large action sequences—can now be generated digitally rather than staged physically.
In animation, Shah says work that once required 30 people for two months can now potentially be done by one person in days.
AI co-director: Behind the scenes, Karthik built a custom AI production pipeline instead of a traditional film crew.
His toolkit included:
Multiple video generation models
Image generation systems
Lip-sync engines
Upscaling tools to bring visuals close to 4K quality
He generated over an hour of footage to produce the final eight-minute film but only 5–10% of that footage actually made the final cut.
Why so much excess? Because AI filmmaking is extremely iterative.
“You generate a shot, edit it, and if it doesn’t work, you regenerate it immediately,” Karthik says. “That kind of flexibility never existed in traditional filmmaking.”
Also Read: Cinema’s next act: Faster, smarter, still human as AI rewires the film industry
AI film infrastructure
Production houses are already investing in dedicated AI systems.
At Collective Artists Network, Rahul Regulapati says AI is becoming the production layer across the entire filmmaking pipeline.
The company has built its own AI cinematic operating system called Galleri5 AI Studio.
“AI runs the heavy lifting while the director retains authorship,” he says.
The new AI film toolkit
Other studios are building their own AI stacks too like Studio Blo which uses tools like Flux, Stable Diffusion, Kling, Nano Banana Pro.
CEO Dipankar Mukherjee said they have also built an internal AI engine that can generate entire film worlds—from characters to environments—from a creative brief.
Meanwhile, Eros Innovation is building its own AI infrastructure using Large Cultural Models (LCM) trained on 12,000 films and 1.5 trillion tokens of cultural data.
Also Read: Beyond ChatGPT: Eros' Ridhima Lulla bets on its culture-first AI to rewrite Indian storytelling
Cheaper films, faster production: Traditional filmmaking requires physical sets, location scouting, large crews, expensive VFX.
AI workflows replace many of these steps with virtual environments and automated pipelines.
Karthik estimates that large-scale films could eventually be produced at just 1–2% of traditional budgets.
For independent filmmakers, that could be revolutionary as currently, directors need studio backing or streaming platforms to greenlight projects.
New jobs in the AI film industry
AI filmmaking is also creating entirely new roles, including -
AI pipeline architects
AI-VFX supervisors
Identity system managers
Model fine-tuning engineers
Hybrid previs artists
First wave of AI films
Several projects suggest AI cinema may reach mainstream audiences soon.
Shekhar Kapur is working on an AI-generated sci-fi film called Warlord.
Ajay Devgn has announced Bal Tanhaji, an AI-driven prequel to Tanhaji.
Abundantia Entertainment's AI division has a slate of six films in the works.
Collective Artists Network is developing multiple AI-assisted films and series.
Also Read: 'Have met every Bollywood studio': Talent, not tech, is real bottleneck in AI filmmaking, says Invideo CEO at AI Summit
The risks: The excitement comes with concerns.
Questions around copyright, training data, and job displacement remain unresolved.
“The biggest risk isn’t the technology,” says Regulapati. “It’s using it without systems—without rights protection, governance or production control.”
The bottomline
For Karthik, the lesson from Unmasked is simple—AI might change how films are made but it won’t replace the storyteller.
“AI is just a tool,” he says. “The emotion, the imagination—that still comes from humans.”
Read the full story
IT doesn’t buy AI-steria
Indian IT walked into the Nasscom Technology & Leadership Forum (NTLF) 2026 under a cloud of AI anxiety. The Nifty IT index had just seen one of its sharpest sell-offs in years, triggered partly by fears that frontier AI tools could compress traditional services work.
But on the ground, the industry’s response was remarkably restrained.
If markets were pricing disruption, executives were busy explaining complexity.
The mood mismatch
HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar perhaps captured the tone best, calling the market reaction to IT stocks “overblown” even as he acknowledged the industry is entering a “painful” AI transition that will force reinvention.
That framing defined much of NTLF 2026. AI dominated conversations, however, panic did not.
Instead of announcements or defensive messaging, discussions repeatedly returned to execution realities, i,e., integration effort and how services firms evolve when productivity rises faster than revenue.
A senior analyst attending the event summed it up bluntly: “For me it was all about AI and how AI is impacting services… What will be the role of service providers in this world?”
A forum defined as much by absences as presence
NTLF’s signals came as much from absences as speeches.
Global participation appeared thinner than usual, with fewer international enterprise voices.
Representation gaps extended domestically too. Several mid-tier IT firms were missing, and among the Big Five, Tech Mahindra did not participate, narrowing the industry’s collective voice at a time of structural transition.
The quieter attendance strengthened a broader sense, i.e., the industry is still forming its AI narrative rather than projecting certainty.
Anthropic becomes the shadow speaker
While Indian IT leaders occupied the stage, one company repeatedly dominated stage and hallway conversations: Anthropic.
Its claims around sharply reducing the cost and complexity of legacy modernisation through AI coding tools had rattled investors globally and triggered fears that automation could weaken outsourcing demand.
Yet executives across companies pushed back against the assumption of immediate disruption.
Wipro COO Sanjeev Jain said enterprise AI deployment involves “much more work than it appears,” requiring integration across both client and internal systems along with responsible AI governance layers.
Cognizant Chief AI Officer Babak Hodjat echoed this view, arguing enterprise AI is an “engineered discipline” requiring deep architectural understanding rather than plug-and-play deployment.
Infosys delivery executive Satish HC similarly described AI adoption as akin to “open heart surgery” for enterprises, highlighting the depth of system changes required.
Together, these comments formed a consistent counter-narrative: AI accelerates productivity minus the engineering complexity.
Pricing anxiety replaces growth talk
Unlike earlier technology cycles driven by cloud optimism, conversations at NTLF also centred on economics.
McKinsey senior partner Noshir Kaka told us that enterprises are not reducing technology spending, with roughly 20% of budgets now allocated to data and AI initiatives. However, about 70% of that spend is being repurposed from existing services budgets rather than entirely new demand.
That shift explains investor nervousness. AI may expand opportunity long term while compressing near-term deal sizes and pricing structures.
Nasscom leaders stressed on this paradox. Fractal co-founder and Nasscom vice chairperson Srikanth Velamakanni said AI could reduce modernisation costs from roughly $15 per line of code to about $2, shrinking project values even as the total addressable market expands dramatically.
In other words, efficiency is arriving before revenue expansion.
The industry enters observation mode
Across sessions, executives acknowledged AI will reshape operating models and workforce structures. TCS CEO K Krithivasan even said employees are encouraged to use AI to deliver work faster “even if it cannibalises revenue,” signalling acceptance of structural change rather than resistance.
Yet none of this translated into alarmist messaging. Leaders recognised disruption but rejected timelines implied by markets and frontier AI headlines.
The bottom line: reality beats hysteria
NTLF 2026 did not deliver a defining AI announcement. Instead, it revealed an industry transitioning from hype to diagnosis.
Markets are debating whether AI replaces services, however, companies are figuring out how services evolve around AI.
For now, Indian IT’s AI worry is real but the industry isn’t buying AI-steria just yet.
Read the story
When global AI met India’s ambition
It was a big week for India as the world’s third-largest digital economy hosted the first-ever global AI summit held in the Global South.
It came at a decisive moment, as India moved to cement its place at the forefront of the rapidly evolving global AI race.
A major step towards that goal was the launch of five sovereign frontier models developed by Indian players such as Sarvam, Gnani.ai, BharatGen, Fractal, and Tech Mahindra.
The India AI Impact Summit also set the stage for the country to project its ambitions and influence the global AI conversation.
The scale of the event was unprecedented on several fronts:
Participation from more than 20 heads of state and government representatives from 118 countries, along with over 100 global AI leaders.
Tech and AI royalty was in full force including Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Shantanu Narayen, Alexandr Wang, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun, alongside the Presidents of Brazil, France, and the Prime Minister of India.
More than 5 lakh visitors, a turnout that also drew criticism over poor crowd management, traffic chaos and logistical confusion.
Over $250 billion in investment pledges in the infra layer, and $20 billion in deep tech commitments.
India also formally joined the US-led Pax Silica coalition, a strategic alliance focused on securing the semiconductor supply chain.
In addition, a consensus on the New Delhi declaration is imminent, with signatories crossing 70 and set to reach 80 today.
While details have not yet been made public, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said there was “huge consensus” on the text.
When it came to global AI leaders, much of the commentary centered on AGI and superintelligence timelines, autonomous agents, and the associated risks.
For Indian AI startups, however, the week was about planting their own flag in the global AI sweepstakes. It was about building models grounded in India and designed to solve the country’s unique challenges.
We spent the past week on the ground at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, bringing you exclusive insights from some of the biggest global voices in Artificial Intelligence.
We spoke to top minds at global tech giants, pioneering AI researchers, and investors. Here is a quick recap:
Sam Altman, OpenAI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that there are 'incredible' small language AI models emerging in India at lower costs, referring to a series of sovereign AI models launched by companies like Sarvam, Gnani.ai, and BharatGen.
He also noted that 'building energy in India is quite remarkable'.
"I've never seen a total amount of energy relentlessly attacking a problem across the entire (AI) stack as anywhere but here," Altman said.
P.S. Altman also addressed his awkward, now-viral exchange with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which happened on stage during a group photo with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures
Tech billionaire and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said India’s IT services companies will need to reinvent themselves in a significant way by the end of the decade as AI reshapes the global technology landscape.
He expressed hope that Infosys becomes a global AI services company. “I think India as an exporter of AI expertise and deployment is a massive opportunity,” he said.
Khosla added that AI vibe coding startup Emergent is performing phenomenally well and is among the fastest growing companies he has ever seen. Emergent has seen its ARR double to $100 million in less than a month. Watch the interview.
Yoshua Bengio, ‘Godfather of AI’
Yoshua Bengio, known as one of the “godfathers of AI”, said governments around the world are not doing enough to allay concerns people have around job losses.
He also noted that Big tech companies are not investing enough in the risk management of AI at present.
Bengio also said that countries such as India must build globally competitive AI systems rather than depending on adapting foreign models. Watch the interview.
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said that India is 'very well poised' to harness AI and thrive in this era.
He also dismissed any competition between Wikipedia and Elon Musk’s Grokipedia. "I think it’s a ridiculous idea (Grokipedia), and it will never work," he said. Watch the interview.
Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski spoke about why India is important to the voice AI company and outlined their plans to open an office in Bengaluru.
Addressing competition from homegrown player Sarvam, Staniszewski acknowledged that the company has a "great team with incredible founders" and praised the model's voice quality.
However, he noted that a complete solution requires both the best models and the best product.
Read the interview (Or watch the video)
Amjad Masad, Replit
Replit co-founder Amjad Masad spoke to us exclusively about the AI coding race, fears of software job displacement, and whether a funding bubble is forming in vibe coding.
"Two kids in India can build and compete with Salesforce. It wasn’t possible even a year ago," he said.
With the US becoming more restrictive on immigration, India is also the top choice for Replit's international expansion, Masad added. Read the interview.
Mustafa Furniturewala, Coursera
India has emerged as the global leader in Generative AI enrolments on Coursera, clocking over 4 million enrolments and recording nearly three sign-ups per minute, said Chief Technology Officer Mustafa Furniturewala.
India’s young workforce is driving rapid upskilling as AI reshapes coding and the software development lifecycle, he said.
Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam
Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar said the government’s grant under the IndiaAI Mission, provided in lieu of a stake, played a crucial role in training the company’s large language models. However, he emphasised that the startup does not intend to “mindlessly” scale model sizes.
He also pushed back against the idea that India should limit itself to smaller systems.
“We should not be bucketing India into saying small language model country. We should build all kinds of things that bring real business value,” he said.
Kumar also spoke about overcoming skepticism, Sarvam’s ambition of ensuring AI reaches everyone in India, and why the country’s AI journey must be defined by long-term conviction rather than short-term hype. Watch the interview.
Roy Jakobs, Philips
Philips Global CEO Roy Jakobs said AI in healthcare is no longer a futuristic promise but is already transforming clinical practice.
He noted that India plays a critical role in Philips’ strategy, offering a unique combination of high healthcare demand and deep engineering talent.
Jakobs added that the company sees India as both a development hub and a launchpad for global AI applications.
What else shaped the India AI Impact Summit
Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on innovators to design and develop in India and deliver solutions to the world and humanity. He also presented what he called India's "MANAV" vision for AI. Here are the 5 big takeaways.
India’s signing of the Pax Silica agreement with the United States will help the country build advanced tech through enhanced access to technologies, IT secretary S Krishnan told us.
India has the momentum in AI adoption with affordable innovation emerging from domestic players, Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu told us. “I believe the IT services industry can flourish if they rapidly deploy AI tools,” he said.
Yann LeCun, widely regarded as one of the godfathers of AI, believes there is another AI revolution coming, but it's not AGI and it's not arriving next year. He also criticised the AI industry, particularly Silicon Valley, for being entirely focused on LLMs.
India has a rare opportunity to emerge as a “full-stack” player in AI, not only as a massive user base but also as a builder and shaper of the technology, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. He also noted that the world cannot afford to let the digital divide morph into an 'AI divide'.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said today's AI systems are impressive but they still have many flaws, with consistency being a crucial one. “They are like jagged intelligence. They are very good at certain things, but they are very poor at other things, including sometimes the same thing,” he said.
India can possibly achieve 20-25% growth if adoption of AI succeeds in the country, said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Global frontier AI companies and Indian innovators have “committed” to publishing anonymised data on how their tools are used in the real world and to systematically testing their models across languages and cultural contexts under the newly unveiled voluntary framework “New Delhi Frontier AI Impact Commitments”.
French President Emmanuel Macron gave a big thumbs up to India’s small language model strategy and the country’s digital leap.
Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang said the company is focused on embedding AI into everyday life in India, unveiling upcoming models and outlining a vision for personalised superintelligence.
Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani outlined the company’s Rs 10-lakh-crore plans to fuel India's AI growth.
At a time when global markets are rattled by claims that AI could render traditional software and services obsolete, the chief executives of India’s three largest IT services firms struck a resolutely confident note, arguing that AI will expand opportunity rather than shrink it.
India’s biggest AI opportunity will emerge in the application layer rather than in building large foundation models, according to Bejul Somaia, Managing Director at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
India holds a significant advantage in shaping the next wave of AI, said Mistral AI’s Arthur Mensch, pointing to the country’s talent base, market scale, and cultural diversity as critical enablers. He said that a quarter of their researchers are Indian.
AI disruption will be a blessing in disguise for core engineers, IIT-Madras Director V Kamakoti told us in an interview. He said it will correct years of talent drift away from core engineering by pushing graduates back into disciplines such as civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering.
A look at how Zepto plugged into India AI Impact Summit with a compact dark store. It processed over 1,700 orders in a single day despite limited hours. Watch the interview.
(P.S. Watch our video interviews from India AI Impact Summit)
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App jaisa koi nahi
This Valentine’s Day, we’re diving into India's surging obsession with AI companions.
These aren’t just bots; they’re digital confidants providing a level of intimacy social media never could. By delivering instant emotional relief and hyper-immersive conversation, these apps don’t just engage users for longer, they keep them coming back for more.
A friend in need: The conversations are “leading on” and can “turn problematic” very quickly, a large investor told us.
“It’s like my wife doesn’t talk to me that flirtatiously,” he said.
There are at least a dozen AI companion apps at play in India. This includes Rumik, Puch AI, Rivi, Samvaad, Bezu AI, QuickSmart AI, Kavana, Hootz, Hanabot, Kognitech AI Solutions, Meko, Liznr and Replican, among others.
The goal of these platforms is simple: keep users engaged and hooked for longer by sounding less like a machine and more human.
They offer immersive experiences like watching YouTube together or even playing a game of chess to reduce the distance between the two sides
The target group: These apps are built to focus more on Hinglish speaking users residing in non-metro regions and the ones who have migrated to metro cities.
“Settling in immediately can be difficult – connections need to be built up, which is where AI companions step in and ease the process quite significantly,” said Ishaan Khosla, Partner, Huddle Ventures.
Gig workers, the ones who deliver our food and groceries, are a key target group too. The nature of these conversations shift depending on what time of the day it is.
“Late nights and early mornings are usually heavy traffic times on these platforms,” an investor said as he highlighted loneliness is at its peak during these times. .
Easy monetisation: Users are initially teased with a limited version of these apps but conversations are so immersive that they do not want to drop off.
Once that cap is hit, the platform prompts users to subscribe – making the path to monetisation almost seamless
The membership fee is also modest — just Rs 99/month in some cases – so users don’t feel the pinch
But thanks to millions in downloads, these micro transactions result in serious money. UPI Autopay mandates ensure the cash registers keep ringing at these platforms
A blessing in disguise: While such platforms are addictive, Munia Bhattacharya, a doctor and Senior Consultant - Clinical Psychology, Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences at Marengo Asia Hospital said such platforms can often be the first line of response.
AI companion tools can provide immediate emotional relief in moments of distress, especially when no one else is around, she told us.
Yet even bullish backers concede that growth needs guardrails. The challenge now isn't just scaling faster, but ensuring the rush for personalisation and profits doesn't outpace responsibility.
Read the full story
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Travel’s new front desk? It’s AI
A solo trip was calling, and Goa felt like the obvious answer, but planning it alone meant fewer suggestions and no second opinions. That is when Myra stepped in, recommending quieter beaches, smart experiences and options that neatly fit my budget.
Myra, by the way, is not a well-meaning friend or a travel buff. She is MakeMyTrip's AI chatbot.
In that short exchange with Myra, I caught a glimpse of a larger shift underway, one where artificial intelligence is quietly transforming how travellers across India plan trips, make bookings and get support.
AI flying high
According to MakeMyTrip co-founder and group CEO Rajesh Magow, AI is now embedded across multiple customer touchpoints:
Trip planning & discovery: It helps users who don’t know where to go but know what vibe they want. Uses conversational flows to recommend destinations and itineraries.
Flights & logistics: Resolves queries around layovers, transit visas and baggage allowances.
Hotels: Generates two-line summaries of reviews from travellers with similar profiles.
Customer support: Identifies intent, suggests next actions and summarises calls before tickets are closed.
Adoption is strongest beyond metros:
Over 50,000 AI-led conversations daily now come from Tier II cities
More than 45% of total usage is from non-metro regions
Voice-led interactions are significantly higher. As Magow puts it, for many users, speaking feels more natural than typing.
Why travel platforms are betting big on AI
Cost efficiency is a major driver.
At Yatra, AI is helping teams scale without expanding headcount. Automation of routine tasks has freed up employees to focus on higher-value work, improving efficiency and profitability.
Thrillophilia has taken this a step further with an AI sales co-pilot:
Analyses customer behaviour and conversations
Scores leads dynamically based on intent
Routes high-intent leads to humans, low-intent ones to AI
Triggers nudges instead of calls when follow-ups aren’t worthwhile
With industry-wide conversion rates hovering around 5%, every lead is expensive. The AI system has already doubled salesperson productivity in six months, with a goal to make teams five times more productive—without adding headcount. The result: higher revenue, same team size.
How AI is being deployed under the hood
Travel platforms are now using AI far beyond chat:
Expense management (Yatra RECAP): Vision analytics detect fraud and duplicate receipts and voice-enabled AI allows users to log expenses verbally.
Agentic AI bots: Handle end-to-end tasks like bookings, cancellations, vouchers and invoices
AI itinerary builders (Thrillophilia): Create personalised plans using traveller profiles, weather, availability and past behaviour
AI travel diaries
Are travellers comfortable with AI? The answer increasingly looks like yes
ixigo reported 3.81 million customer queries handled by AI in a single quarter.
During peak flight disruption in December of 2025, AI handled up to 90% of calls
Yatra’s DIYA chatbot has seen 10–15% month-on-month user growth, resolving most queries without human support
Cleartrip reports strong adoption among Gen Z and digitally savvy travellers
Corporate travel players like ATPI are seeing AI move from pilot to daily operations, sharply improving compliance and adoption
Also Read: How ixigo's decade-old AI bet paid off during Indigo crisis
The big takeaway
AI is no longer an experiment in travel, it’s infrastructure. From discovery to bookings, sales to support, platforms are using AI to cut costs, boost productivity and deliver faster, more personalised experiences.
The result is a leaner, smarter travel business—where humans focus on high-intent moments, and machines handle the rest.
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6 things the Economic Survey says about India’s AI future
The Economic Survey 2025-26 is blunt about one thing: India’s AI moment will not be decided by who builds the biggest model. It will be decided by who manages constraints better.
Constraints around compute, power, talent, jobs and capital run through the AI chapter, tying together what might otherwise look like disconnected policy debates.
Seen together, the Survey reads less like a tech vision and more like an operating manual for doing AI in a resource-constrained economy.
Here is what stood out.
1. AI compute: Where ambition meets reality
Reality, the Survey notes, is that AI compute is becoming harder and more expensive to secure. Global shortages of GPUs, high-bandwidth memory, and storage are pushing up costs and limiting availability.
Availability, rather than funding appetite, could become the binding constraint for India’s data centre and AI expansion plans.
The Survey does not see financing as the main bottleneck, that arises when capital, power infrastructure, and hardware access fail to move in sync.
Sync failures, it warns, can stall AI capacity creation even when demand and funding are strong. Read more
2. Why the government is stress-testing, not predicting
Predicting AI capacity needs is a losing game, the Survey argues. Game-changing technologies evolve too fast.
Instead, it proposes stress-testing how financing, electricity and hardware interact, to surface coordination failures early and guide policy intervention where it matters most.
Constraint shifts from machines to people when the Survey turns to talent.
Talent gaps, especially in hands-on experience with large models, risk holding India back more than compute shortages.
Unless training starts earlier and is aligned with industry needs rather than confined to elite or late-stage programmes. Read more
3. Applications over frontier LLM races
The race to build frontier models dominate global AI headlines, but the Survey is sceptical of their relevance for India. India’s edge lies in application-led AI built on domestic data, small models and sector-specific use cases.
Those that work on existing hardware and scale across millions of users matter more than scale for its own sake.
Leverage, in this strategy, comes from open systems. Open-source and open-weight models lower entry barriers and allow a broader set of startups, researchers and public institutions to participate.
Infrastructure thinking runs deep in the Survey, enough for it to float an ‘AI-OS’ idea, pooling datasets, compute, and open-source efforts much like earlier digital public goods. (Think UPI or Aadhaar!). Read more.
Also read: Why India’s GenAI rush creates 13x more startups, while funding rises just 1.6x
4. Jobs: The apocalypse hasn’t arrived, but neither has clarity
That said, clarity is still missing on AI’s labour impact. Early evidence suggests no mass job destruction yet, offering short-term comfort.
Comfort, however, is not a strategy especially in a labour-abundant economy, the Survey cautions.
Talk turns darker when the Survey flags an ‘AI debt bomb’.
Bomb here refers to highly leveraged AI infrastructure financed off balance sheets.
If stress-tested by slowing demand or geopolitics, it could trigger a financial shock with spillovers far beyond tech.
5. AI Economic Council
Transition management is why the Survey proposes an AI Economic Council.
The Council would focus less on regulation and more on adoption, aligning AI with jobs and skills, and slowing down where necessary.
This is necessary because speed without readiness can be destabilising. Read more
6. GCCs: A quiet stabiliser
Closer to home, stability comes from services and global capability centres (GCCs).
These captives are emerging as a key lever in embedding AI into enterprises.
Enterprises, however, do not automatically translate services growth into broader institutional upgrades, the Survey warned. Read more.
The bottom line
The Economic Survey resists AI hype but gives way to a colder assessment: India’s AI future is not about racing ahead, but about not tripping over its own constraints.
Constraints if managed well, may turn out to be the country’s biggest advantage.
Two sentences from the Survey summarise the scenario well: “These asymmetries do not imply that India is at a structural disadvantage in the AI era. Instead, they define the constraints within which a viable and sustainable AI strategy must be formulated.”
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Davos 2026: What top global AI voices told us
We spent the past week on the ground at the World Economic Forum in Davos, bringing you exclusive insights from some of the biggest global voices in Artificial Intelligence.
We spoke to top minds at global tech giants, pioneering AI researchers, investors, and leaders at AI infrastructure companies and major IT services firms (including the biggest voice in Davos 2026). Here is a quick recap:
Andrew Ng, AI pioneer
Andrew Ng, one of the leading global AI voices, advised India to look beyond building fully sovereign AI systems and embrace open source, arguing it offers better protection than sovereignty alone.
He dismissed fears of widespread AI job losses, pinning recent tech layoffs on overhiring.
Ng, who started and led the Google Brain team until December 2012, acknowledged Google's current momentum on the back of the powerful Gemini 3 model, but noted that the entire AI landscape is currently 'white hot', presenting an opportunity for Anthropics, the OpenAIs, and many others of the world to play a big role in it.
He also didn't mince words, warning that United States becoming less immigrant-friendly is a "huge unforced error"
Ng, the founder of DeepLearning.AI, managing general partner at AI Fund and co-founder of Coursera, also weighed in on the elephant in the room: Are we in an AI bubble or not?
Read the full interview (Watch the video)
Andrew Bosworth, Meta
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth called India a "hugely important' market for the social media giant’s wearable and AI device strategy, due to a massive demand.
India is Meta's largest user market with a combined user base of over a billion monthly users. But it also presents complex challenges, he noted.
Meta has doubled down on smart glasses, which have emerged as a surprise hit for the social media giant.
Bosworth however noted that AI glasses won't be the only form factor available and the company is "prototyping every kind of crazy idea you can imagine." Go deeper.
Joel Kaplan, Meta
Meta's chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan praised India's pro-innovation approach to AI regulation.
He noted that the government recognises how valuable tech innovations are for entrepreneurs and small businesses, which reflects in the general approach the government has adopted so far.
Kaplan told us in an interview that the application layer is the right place for India to make the investment since the scale of investment to build foundation models is quite significant. “I am not sure it's the best allocation of taxpayer resources or capital," he said. Read more.
Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis echoed a similar view, suggesting that with enough foundation model providers already in play, India should focus on applied AI and partnerships.
Hassabis also noted that India is a very important market for the tech giant, since a lot of DeepMind research happens in the country's Bengaluru office.
India is also Google's largest market in terms of user base for its products and a crucial region for the growth of its AI efforts.
"Indians love AI and they love using it. I think it's going to be a great technology for India economically," he said. Read more.
Andrew Feldman, Cerebras
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman emphasised that India’s talent, infrastructure push and partnership ecosystem make it impossible for global AI companies to ignore the country.
“As a market, as a place to partner, as a place to deploy gear, I think one would be a fool to overlook India,” he said.
Feldman also noted that Nvidia’s dominance is being challenged as fast inference reshapes the AI chip market. He cited Nvidia’s acquisition of Groq for a reported $20 billion as proof of this transition.
In an interview with us, he also spoke about the growing importance of India in the global AI ecosystem, and the debate around an AI bubble.
Read the full interview (Watch the video)
Nick Tzitzon, ServiceNow
ServiceNow vice-chairman Nick Tzitzon described India as a serious centre of gravity for enterprise AI adoption and execution.
“India is our pride and joy,” he said, pointing to the company’s international development centre in Hyderabad, where teams are building some of the most innovative products.
Calling it “the India century,” Tzitzon said he sees an explosion of energy and innovation across the country, including in Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Mumbai.
He also noted that enterprises are moving past AI’s early experimentation phase and are now asking for measurable outcomes. Find out more.
Nigel Vaz, Publicis Sapient
Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz shared a similar view, saying that companies have moved out of the experimentation phase.
“Last year was about proof of concept. Now, it’s about tying AI to real workflow transformation and business outcomes.” he told us.
He noted, however, that the real bottleneck is often not the technology but the foundations beneath it, with legacy data and tech debt hindering meaningful deployment. Read more.
Raj Ganguly, B Capital
B Capital, managing over $9 billion in assets globally, will do more deals in the AI and AI services space in India this year, co-founder Raj Ganguly told us in an interview.
While acknowledging the strides made by India’s startup ecosystem through domestic IPOs, Ganguly stressed the need for more liquidity events.
“IPOs can only do so much. We need to see more M&As, we need to see more secondaries. The maturing of the Indian venture capital ecosystem will lead to more liquidity coming in,” he told us. Read more
Paolo Dal Cin, Accenture
Accenture is setting up a new lab in Bengaluru focused on security for physical AI and robotics, the company’s Global Lead for Cybersecurity, Paolo Dal Cin, told us in an interview.
Accenture’s cybersecurity business is worth $10 billion, with around 30,000 security professionals worldwide.
Of these, 13,000 are based in India, highlighting the scale of India’s role in Accenture’s cyber practice. Find out more.
Cedric Neike, Siemens
Siemens AG’s Cedric Neike argued that if India scales manufacturing for AI data centres, it could be a huge opportunity.
He believes India is at an inflection point in manufacturing linked to AI.
Industrial AI is becoming central across sectors, driven by both supply chain disruptions and the need for more efficiency amid global talent shortages, he said. Read more
More from our Davos coverage:
All major global technology players want to have a big presence in India, says Ashwini Vaishnaw
Indian IT is not lagging in AI, says Wipro chairman Rishad Premji
‘India is a phenomenal market’, SAP’s Thomas Saueressig plans more campuses in the country
Many CEOs today don’t know what to do next: PwC Global Chairman Mohamed Kande as AI, Trump tariffs uncertainty looms
India is our second-largest enterprise market as RoI drives adoption, says ElevenLabs
Bajaj General Insurance resolves 95% of customer grievances with Gen AI, says CEO Tapan Singhel
(Prefer video? Watch our Davos 2026 interviews)
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